Putting Stuff Down For Fun and Profit

I was homophobic as a young man. It's true the logging town I grew up in wasn't the cultural nexus of the world, but that's an excuse, not a reason. The embarrassing part is that I kept being homophobic long after I left to get an excellent university education.

So the first lesson shall be:

Don't assume that bigots are ignorant, that they're "just doing what they've learned". It starts that way, sure, but if you're still doing it as an adult, something else is going on.

Something less innocent and more actionable.

What makes my case even less parsable is that I was always the kid who brooked no redneck crap from his peers. Bad-mouth any race or religion on my schoolyard, and you were in for a throw-down.

Homophobia is the only bigotry I ever went in for.

Figuring out how that happened took me a few decades, and is, for our purposes, peripheral. What's less mysterious is why it continued, long after I saw better, and how it finally ended.

The first is shamefully simple: into my twenties, friends and I bonded in part over regressive "jokes" – hack work that taxed our literary talents very little – and I was loathe to be "that guy", the one who takes exception, smashing the fourth wall and casting a pall over the party.

Sadly, it truly was as basic as that. And I suspect it's the same for most bigots: cowhearted fear of being excluded from a social cohort that defines itself, in whole or in part, by that reflex.

The end finally came when I just couldn't stand the ignominy anymore. One day in my early 30s, the rest of me sat the pathetic part down and said, "You're done. From this point, we're Queen's evidence on sexual orientation."

And that was that.

But here's the point of this post:

I thought I was doing this for my gay brothers and sisters: bringing them some greater measure of peace by leaving off my unsolicited judgement on matters well outside my jurisdiction.

But the instant I put that baloney down, a tremendous weight slid off my shoulders.

The relief was palpable – so physical I nearly wept. See, maintaining opposition against an entire demographic – any demographic, whether a certified target of the Right or Left – draws a killing amount of energy. You don't see it; you think your contempt and criticism hurt those other people. You think you're getting even, winning, reigning supreme, in your hammer-headed refusal to stand down from this fight that you picked.

While in reality your designated enemy doesn't even know who you are; the American expression "get over yourself" is germane here. So the only person out of pocket is you.

And the day you stop wasting yourself on that sustained tantrum sticks in your mind forever. That day you authorised yourself to invest all that capital in other, better, useful things. Now you can put those resources to ends that bring comfort, fulfilment, and satisfaction, rather than blindly incinerating them in the firebox of your petty anger.

And the next day, of course, I immediately discovered how many of my closest friends, even family, were gay. They'd been isolating me from that truth so as not to trigger the disdain that denied me their full companionship. And because my pouting kept me stupid, I was literally the last in our circle to know.

In other words, after all that concentrated rejection in the name of continued membership in my peer group, the odd man out was me. My friends, good people all, had given that rubbish up years before.

I think this early experience of clear-seeing primed me for the kensho that would make me a monk ten years later. Because convictions are worthless.

You can generate endless justifications for the unjustifiable, build palaces of pretext, rehearsing your case for a non-existent court that has no judge. But your efforts influence no objective outcome.

You don't change any law of physics; your hard frown wins no argument.

Because what is, is.

And unless you're an idiot, you don't resist it.


Perceiving how little the universe gives a damn about me liberated me from slavery to myself.


(Photo courtesy of Matthieu Bühler and Unsplash.com.)

Hindsight

I was difficult when I was younger.

Part of me would like to go back and face some of those challenges and circumstances again, except... not be a jerk this time. Think it might help?

"Not making a bad situation worse." Right up there with "being grateful for your blessings", and "cherishing other people just because they're in the boat with you."

Lessons it took me longer than most to learn.


(Photo courtesy of Jonny Keicher and Unsplash.com.)

The 1 Habit of Truly Decent People

We're hearing a lot these days about patriotism and national greatness and ideological purity and economic theory and cold dead fingers. The speakers seem to take it for granted that their convictions are honourable, simply because they are convictions.

I've encountered this misconception again and again in my half-century walkabout, first as a historian and then as a religious man. Faith is sexy. It's dramatic and macho and you get to make stirring speeches with lots of sanctimonious platitudes, like a movie hero.

But take it from me: given enough indulgence and half a chance, believers will destroy the world.

Just being embattled doesn't confer honour. Bad causes are a giant waste of time and life, to say nothing of the mountain of karmic debt. Shall we free-associate a few examples?

• the Southern cause in the American Civil War
• the Third Reich
• Soviet Communism

All three demanded utter allegiance, promised endless glory, and made sacrifice a virtue. They were also pointless, stupid, and evil, and if there's a judgement at the end of this life, those who devoted their lives to them are unhappy now. Their unshakeable faith is worth exactly nothing.

Yet people continue to insist they can skip the humility, self-examination, and moral courage required of competent adults, and make a thing right by sheer force of conviction.

I know what that's like. I was a revolutionary myself. I clung tightly to a list of high-minded principles. That made me angry, which I took for a mark of righteousness. And that anger made me hypocritical, untrustworthy, and ultimately counter-revolutionary. I could – and did – turn on others for the slightest imagined shortcoming. (Worst of these: not being as angry as I was.)

Let's be clear: belief itself is the problem here. We're taught that it's the soul of decency, but it's not. Belief is meant constantly to be raked: kicked around, wrung out, scraped clean, tuned up, and thrown out entirely when broken. If you're rushing around this rock "knowing" stuff, you're morally out of control, and that makes you the problem here.

The following, in no particular order, are some of the questions I pitched myself during the gruelling Dharma combat I undertook when I became a monk. As the assiduous practice of zazen shifted me out of lawyer mode, things that had previously remained invisible – by slyly standing right on my chest – became clear.


Self-Interrogation

(Tying yourself to a chair and shining a bright light in your face is optional. But it worked for me.)

• Do my convictions make me a builder, or a predator?
• Do I applaud others who call for insight and solution, or judgement and reaction?
• Am I embattled because I'm right, or because I'm wrong?
• Is my strategy "bold advance", or "dogged defence"?
• Am I fighting ideas, or people?
• When I'm conservative, what am I conserving? Is my position rational, or emotional?
• When I'm progressive, what would I impose on others? Would these measures eliminate suffering, or just redistribute it?
• Do I count a victory when my actions result in more resentment, or less? When the right people suffer, or no-one does?
• Do I abandon comrades accused of wrongdoing, or take a public stand for fairness and forgiveness?
• What about opponents?
• Do I practice realpolitik, or morality?
• Do I speak louder while attacking, or defending?

Thanks to such questions (which in Zen practice are not directly answered), I sloughed off a lot of convictions that had accrued over the years by static cling. Now I have a core of well-vetted convictions that pass muster. (Mind: I don't say that I pass muster. I still have to hurl these challenges daily, and I'm daily shamed by the results. But that shame is productive.)

So give it a shot. See what you come up with.

It's the 1 Habit of Truly Decent People: they demand more of themselves than they do of others.


(Photo courtesy of John Pavelka, Wikimedia Commons, and the Democratic People's We Totally Are Guys Just Look At The Strength Of Our Conviction Republic of Korea.)

Proof of Redemption

I was leafing through the Seattle Daily Times for 26 November 1963 when I happened upon a fascinating crumb of history.

Readers of a certain age will recognise this date as one of a particularly dark and troubling string: four days before, John F. Kennedy had been assassinated by a sniper, in the urban core of Dallas, as massive crowds looked on.

I was too little to remember, but the hushed recollections of elders would be a counterpoint of my youth. A pall settled on everything for weeks. Months.

Forever, to be honest.

But what intrigues me today, reading the press of the time, is how steadfastly the American people manned their stations. This was the height of the Cold War, when paranoia and drunken raving about alleged enemies were standard, even among the otherwise level-headed. And the assassin was one of the dozen-odd non-imaginary Marxists in the US: a fair-dinkum Communist Party member who'd once repudiated his country and applied for Soviet citizenship. What are the odds?

Yet even the Seattle Times – a firmly, sometimes cartoonishly, right-wing organ in those days – ran no fist-shaking diatribes, no calls to abandon civil rights or judicial sovereignty, no petitions to torture suspected terrorists, as too great a threat to entrust to America's ill-conceived, chuckleheaded law.

The contrast with today is jarring. But it gets even better.

Floating mid-page, among pieces on the subsequent sensational murder of suspect Lee Harvey Oswald, and the presidential funeral the day after that, is the following headline:

Tacoma Ultra-Rightist Quits Post Over Kennedy Slaying

Say what?

Check it out, brothers and sisters:

TACOMA (AP) A Tacoma leader of an ultra-conservative organization resigned today because of President Kennedy's assassination. He said all extremists must share the blame.

J. (Bud) Nelson said he had written Frederick R. Kluge of Burley, head of the state organization:

"Though it was a left-wing Communist who wantonly assassinated our President... I feel that every radical, left and right, had his hand on the rifle butt and finger on that trigger.

"We are all guilty (morally) of fomenting hatreds of one sort or another, thus guilty of a common act of cruelty.

"Therefore I have no choice but to hereby tender my official resignation from the Washington Council, Citizen's Councils of America. And I pray to my God that he forgive me for harboring any prejudices that I might have harbored."

Nelson, who announced formation of the Tacoma chapter a few months ago, said that henceforth he would devote his energies to fighting "those who oppose our great American ideals of freedom for all – no matter the race, color or creed – and justice for all."

Jizo H. Bodhisattva!

For those too young to have to know, Citizen's Councils of America were the political wing of the Ku Klux Klan. Originally a loose affiliation of White Citizens Councils set up to orchestrate violence against black citizens and their white supporters in Southern states, by the late 50s they'd modified their name and struck out to organise bigots across the nation.

"Ultra-conservative" is a euphemism in this context; this-here is a sho' nuff Axis of Evil.

So Mr. Nelson hadn't just bumbled into this group; this guy had a major hate on, and had pulled others like him into what must have been one of the state's largest CCA chapters.

And yet he was a man of conscience. He had, somewhere inside, that inquisitor that demands an unblinking account of one's own responsibility for suffering. It's the genetic origin of decency, and under adequate pressure it asserted itself, trumping such powerful attachments as peer pressure and fear of admitting error.

This doesn't happen every day. In this case, it's almost miraculous.

I did my best to follow up on the story, but only succeeded in verifying the man's existence. He vanishes from the news thereafter, and apparently from politics as well. There are no further memberships, no board minutes, no letters to the editor, that the Internet recalls. If he later reverted to his rightwing predilections, or continued on the path of enlightenment, he did so privately, without attempting to enlist others.

But my God, what a moment. Few have the courage to examine themselves as he did, or to atone so publicly.

I could have known Bud Nelson; he lived twenty minutes from where I grew up. He's gone now, so I'll never get to ask him what that moment was like, or what it came to mean to him over the years.

But one way or the other, his story is yet more proof that it does happen. However rarely, some people undergo a crisis of conscience, and come out the other side redeemed.

It's not just me.

Reconciliation Koan

Loyalty, forgiveness, and reconciliation make me cry. Death and suffering and loss, these also touch me; I'm sensitive and I won't apologise for it. But people loving each other makes me cry.

I'm not sure why. Envy, maybe. But it feels more like elation.



(Photo of De verzoening van Jacob en Esau (Gen. 33), by Peter Paul Rubens, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Staatsgalerie im neuen Schloss Schleissheim.)