Touching Vulnerability, Becoming Human

Last Wednesday, we had a formation up at Ngatiawa. It was my last Desert Day for this year at L'Arche. Father Rod led us with some excerpts he'd gathered from Jean Vanier's work. I'd like to put them up here and do a bit of reflection before I tell a small story.

From Father Rod:

Here are some thoughts from Becoming Human from chapter 1, "Lonliness." The section is headed, "Order and Disorder." I chose this piece to shar because it hits at the level of change and emergence from the heart places, the place of our own insecurity and brokenness.

"In human beings there is a constant tension between order and disorder, connectedness and loneliness, evolution and revolution, security and insecurity. Our universe is constantly evolving: the old order gives way to a new order and this in its turn crumbles when the next order appears. It is no different in our lives in the movement from birth to death.

"Change of one sort or another is the essence of life...when we try to prevent the forward movement of life, we may succeed for a while...but inevitably there is an explosion.

"And so empires of ideas, as well as empires of wealth and power, come and go. To live well is to observe in today's apparent order the tiny anomalies that are the seeds of change, the harbingers of the order of tomorrow. This means living in a stat of a certain insecurity, in anguish and loneliness, which, at its best, can push us towards the new. Too much security and the refusal to evolve, to embrace change, leads to a kind of death. Too much insecurity, however, can also mean death. To be human is to create sufficient order so that we can move into insecurity and seeming disorder. In this way we discover the new." (p. 13-15)

"As humans we crave belonging, we need the connectedness to others that brings security, but this connectedness can prevent the natural movement and evolution that we need in our lives. It can also get in the way of creativity and stifle the natural loneliness that pushes us to discover something new, that pushes us closer to God. This loneliness is the loneliness of the individual who steps out from the group, who takes a chance on what can be discovered and done outside of the norm.

"So here is the paradox: as humans we are caught between competing drives, the drive to belong, to fit in and be a part of something bigger than ourselves, and the drive to let our deepest selves rise up, to walk alone, to refuse the accepted and the comfortable, and this can mean, at least for a time, the acceptance of anguish. It is in the group that we discover what we have in common. It is as individuals that we discover a personal relationship with God. We must find a way to balance our two opposing impulses." (p.18-19)

"When Jean Vanier talks about that place [of safety and intimacy] he often stretches out his arm and cups his hand as if it holds a small, wounded bird, He asks: 'What will happen if I open my hand fully?' We say: 'The bird will try to flutter it's wings, and it will fall and die.' Then he asks again: 'But what will happen if I close my hand?' We say: 'The bird will be crushed and die.' Then he smiles and says, 'An intimate place is like my cupped hand, neither totally open nor totally closed. It is the space where growth can take place." -Henri Nouwen in Lifesigns

"Community is a place of conflict... [One] source of conflict is between being open and being closed. [Too often] the extended family is closed...people may sacrifice their personal growth, freedom and becoming to the god of belonging...a death to personal growth. A community which is called to keep people open is a vulnerable community that takes risks. It does not hand on to its own security and power, obliging people to stay.

There is a myth about community, just as there is a myth about marriage. The reality of marriage is that it is a place where a man and a woman are called to sacrifice their own egos on the altar in order to create one body..." -Jean Vanier in From Brokenness to Community

Now, I'd like to start my reflections by saying that I seldom agree wholeheartedly with Jean Vanier. Marriage, for instance, isn't always between a "man and a woman." And I find it very difficult to imagine myself has having "opposing impulses," one half of which are headed toward any objective other than God. On that same token, however, I have to admit that I find his words to be generally very inspiring and that I really can't help but be influenced by them.

Vanier talks about being human as being in a constant tension and I couldn't agree more. Somewhere, I think I must have said as much in my own writing. The basic idea here that I'm infatuated with is this tension between order and chaos. The only kinds of Gifts worth wanting are the ones that come out of the unknown and the unexpected and that's because such Gifts have the power to change everything; to mutate the known universe, so to speak.

I also love that Vanier talks about community as a place of conflict. Conflict is not only common, but also quite necessary. For many of us, conflict is the only way we understand boundaries and limitations. During our Desert Day, Father Rod went on to talk about the ways in which we touch each other's vulnerabilities, reaching out to feel the wound of another in the same way that Thomas wishes to touch the holes in Jesus's hands and side. We provoke one another; we find each other by finding the weak spots. And, therefore, the whole phenomenon of community is made from these weaknesses; these sensitivities; these vulnerabilities.

Tonight, after dinner, we were getting ready to do the dishes when one of my own vulernabilities was prodded by a core member of ours. She wanted to help with the dishes so much that she actually refused to let assistants anywhere near the basin, perhaps afraid that we would rob her of her power by checking the cleanliness of her work. Although the confrontation did not get physical, I did attempt to force her away from her position, so that I could wash the dishes myself. Upon reflection, I realize that I have a great fear of not being wanted. I need to be needed. When this core member asserted her own independence by refusing to be helped, it touched a wound inside of me. I reacted to protect myself; to preserve my need to belong; to be needed somehow.

Of course, if we are to have clean dishes, then our core members will require some help. Where then is the balance? As assistants, we often speak of the blurry line between our work and our lives in community. Tonight offered me some clarity in that line. It is Julie's job to do the dishes. As a matter of fact, it's the job of all our core members and they all know it. It is my job (strictly speaking) to make sure that the dishes are clean. I realize now that the obstinate core member in this story was merely trying to preserve her place, the same as me. She obviously felt insecure; that I might try to take it from her. Being a royal idiot myself, I did exactly that. In the end, a refusal to share the task led us both to complete dissatisfaction. Yet the clash was necessary. Because, in the end, we both gained the same insight. It was only through the conflict that we learned to be with one another.

I told her (once we had both apologized and agreed to re-do all the dishes, sharing the job from the beginning to the end) that I think it's important to share what we have, even though we have different roles. It's the "being together" that makes us a L'Arche community, I said. She asked me, "Why?" And I couldn't really find the words, but this sentence came out of my mouth: "Because, otherwise, we're just a bunch of people."

Now this was a strange thought for me. I had always been brought up to believe in the individual person and individual rights. But here I was, using the word "people" as a diminutive. Why do we have relationships anyway? Isn't simply being a "person" the very pinnacle of evolutionary history? Why do we feel so compelled to be wounded and to touch the wounds of others? I think it's because of what Vanier says about that tension between connectedness and individuality: We don't want to be "just people." We want to create something larger; to sacrifice our egos on some altar in order to make one body.

The evolution keeps going. Contrary to some of the thoughts of Jacques Derrida, deconstruction does not spiral downward into death, it spirals up into life. That is to say, the gaps in our Being do not open so that we are torn apart. Rather, these gaps open to reveal new Gifts to us, to change us. In doing so, they do not pull an organism apart, but instead, cause it to merge with the Other that provokes it. In this merger, this union, the organism no longer exists only for itself, but rather the symbiotic whole. I think of those 3 (or so) trillion carbon-based robots that, when stacked together, make up your brain. What a miserable existence; toiling to fire electrical pulses all the time in endless cycles. What rights does a brain cell have? And yet it quickly becomes clear that the cell does not live for itself.

Community can teach us such lessons, yes. Even more importantly, however, community can give us the actual connections needed to form that next layer of Being that we crave so much. In a community, you know exactly how small you are. We're up to almost 7 billion now and that, my friends, is alot of vulnerability.

Lessons Learned

It's time for me to answer the final big question for this year: What, exactly, did I come away with? Or, posited less selfishly, what is it that I have been taught by my year in L'Arche?

Lesson Number 1: A Memory of Place

Every person has a certain memory, perhaps even every thing, but this year I learned that places have memories as well, especially communities. Communities remember their foundings, growth, obstacles, and refoundings as a whole, but communities also remember all the people who made and make it.

What I mean, in my case, is that even though I have not personally experienced the beginning, history, and growth of L'Arche Kapiti, I know these events. I do not know them in a merely cognitive sense, as information that has been downloaded into me from others, but in a deeper sense. I have met most of the people involved. I have experienced their touches; their individual characters. I have felt an emotional impact from them, despite the fact that I was not here when when most of them were.

Some would call this "institutional" memory, but L'Arche isn't really an institution. Rather than the memory of L'Arche Kapiti being summed up in so many reports on file, it is kept, most prominently, by our core members. They know the faces and names of those long gone, the times of trouble, and all the moments of fun and excitement. If anyone asks them, they will talk first about their friends.

In addition to having this memory of place; in addition to now being a small part of this larger story, I also have a personal memory of place. I can measure my changes in attitude and perception from the time that I arrived until now. I can tell you who it is who has provoked these personal changes. I can name incidents and names. I can talk also of the wider Kapiti community will all of it's unsung heroes, that holds our little community so gently. I can tell stories of these people, this place, and myself.

Say what you will about Julie (and I do), but that woman has the best emotional intuition I have ever witnessed. When I'm going through a hard time, there's simply no way I can hide it from her, even when I try my hardest to keep it all in. And, not only does Julie know exactly how I'm feeling, but she's there to offer me a kind word, a pat on the head, and a cup of tea. It's pure magic and it's worth some deep appreciation.

Beside memory, I now know what stories are: Storytelling is a memory machine. When you tell a story, you are uploading all of your memories into language to pass them back down to your audience. When you hear a story, you're gaining knowledge through memory. It may be factually imperfect, but it is memory nonetheless. And, when you love a story, you can retell it as though it were your own. This is because, really - on some level, you belong to that story. It is a part of what makes you who you are. You wouldn't be the same without your favorite stories because they contain some of your most precious memories; they literally hold pieces of you.

Lesson Number 2: Fear Stops Everything

I've spoken just a bit before about what is feels like to live under a cloud of passive aggression. It's simply a terrible existence to have. I would like to extend that here to include all types of fear. As a reaction to stimuli, fear is mean to keep us safe. Fear inhibits action. When I am inactive, when I find myself unable to start a difficult conversation, when I find myself losing eye contact, when I find that I am avoiding someone, then I know that I am living in fear because it feels as though I am constantly being inhibited.

In the short-term, perhaps fear is a useful thing. But, let's face it, nobody is getting out of here alive. We're going to give our lives for something. Fear does not stop that process of living and dying, it only inhibits actions along the way. Fear puts tension on your muscles and pressure on your bones (at least is feels that way to me). It's a kind of prison, really, if drawn out over the long-term.

Let me make this a little personal. There are some people I just cannot stand to live with. They rub me in all the wrong ways almost all the time, right down their pesky little mannerisms, even the seemingly innocuous ones. I know that, if ever I should have to start a difficult conversation with one particular core member, my relationship with her will almost always suffer for it. I can't win. So, for a while, I simply avoided starting the conversation. Why fight? What's the point? Well, after living in the tension of fear for too long, things finally just boil over and everybody suffers for it. Is fear of some personal emotional discomfort really worth that? Of course, I eventually had to conclude that "no, it is not." So, now, I always try to bring up the hard things whenever appropriate. And when I do, I try to remember that...

Lesson Number 3: Honesty is (in) Everything

Now, if the matter at hand is important enough, I know that I can fight about it if I need to. I have the emotional control to be angry when I need to be, even if I don't feel like it. This very important learned emotional intelligence allows me to take a discussion up to the level of argument and argument to outright feud (if the situation calls for such). Before L'Arche, I never would have thought such a thing was possible in me, not to mention sometimes necessary.

The trouble of course, is knowing when it's appropriate to exercise emotional release and over what issues. I get the impression that my generation has been raised on too much happiness psychology. We've got it into our heads somehow that healthy people just never fight because they're too busy focusing on the positive to let any of those nasty negative emotions into the picture. I really doubt that. After L'Arche, I know that, as humans, we need our full emotional range to feel happy and well in any relationship. Ownership of one's feelings can open up both parties in a relationship, so that everybody gets closer together. And all it takes to do that is honesty.

An example: A certain core member of ours has a issue with his temper. He's a physical guy who likes to throw his weight around and doesn't respond much to verbal tones. Anything spoken in a soft tone, he generally disregards. One particular day, this fellow starts harassing other people for no good reason, lashing out at them, slamming doors, and projecting his anger onto everyone in vocal range. What would you do, as an assistant? Well...How does all that make you feel? Aren't these actions unfair and upsetting? Sure they are. So, just own that feeling of anger and express it. Mind you, we're not talking about violence here, just an honest ownership of feeling. When I know how I feel, I can put it out there as a kind of communication. Firm body language, raised tone of voice, and some neutral physical contact put the situation right in order because, now, the person on the receiving end of my feelings can respond honestly themselves. A conversation is happening (though perhaps not verbally as such). If pursued, it will eventually highlight the original cause of the anger (usually - nothing is 100% certain).

Attempts to protect other people's feelings by hiding my own I find to be quite counterintuitive. In the end, that sort of dialog is just another kind of power game, playing itself out in relentless circles. Honesty puts an end to it, provokes real change, and challenges a person at a much deeper level. Of course, we can't fight all the time. There has to be balance. Which brings me to my next point.

Lesson Number 4: Don't Decide on Topics, Decide on Agendas

There are lots of people who have a certain "thing" that they think is correct and therefore push toward in almost all situations. I can't fault people for having strong values. I have strong values too. But my point with this lesson is to say that predetermining what the best outcome of a situation is can often be a gigantic hangup. The reason I say that is because (1) if you lose the outcome you were betting on, then you're basically being walked on by the person you're trying to relate to. Either that, or (2) you win, get exactly what you want, and become a kind of arbiter; a boss. Even if you "win," the latter case still causes the relationship to suffer because nobody likes to be bossed around. If a relationship is going to suffer either way, what's the solution?

Well, first, I had to learn to give up on what I thought was the best thing to do for a given situation. The specifics of what I thought were clearly logical are most certainly not always so to others. Does it matter that all the spoons aren't in the same drawer? Does it matter that the washing will take an extra hour to dry? Does it matter that someone didn't wash their hands before dinner time? On the first two, the answer is almost always "no." They're simply not worth the energy that it would take to discuss them seriously. Why rob someone of their responsibility simply because a job hasn't been done in the way you would have done it? In short, get over it.

On the last question, however, the answer is yes. So, choosing from the three examples given, which one are we going to talk about today? Which one is important enough to warrant a serious conversation? You might hear this one called "picking your battles," but I prefer to think of these topics as bills moving through a law-making body. By the time we get to the decision-making final vote, the outcome should be natural because there will be a mutual give-and-take from letting the previous decisions go. In the end it looks something like this: "Today, we do the laundry the way Kim wants and the hand-washing the way I want." Everybody gets a place. Everybody gets a responsibility. And, most importantly, there are no petty power games going on.

It's not always a perfect system and we do tend to make hard and fast rules about important things like hand-washing and showers and things, but, generally speaking, it's best for everybody if everybody has a say. Giving everyone their say is much easier if your heart's set on a conversation instead of a conclusion.

Lesson Number 5: Just Make a Decision

Like I said above, honesty is extremely important. Also, like I said above, fear is worth avoiding most of the time. If you put those two into a decision-making scenario, the outcome is this one: Just make a decision.

You're in a position where you have to make a decision about something. It's important. You may have a number of options or only a few, but the decision has to be made very soon. Of course, you'll want to gather up all the necessary information first, before deciding anything. Usually, however, the deeper truth here is that something will be lost, regardless of what you decide and that everything will be lost if no decision is made. The solution is simple: own your feelings, make a decision.

Now, I'm often frightened by the prospect of choosing incorrectly. I could, after all, make a huge mistake. I've also learned, however, that (generally speaking) making mistakes is perfectly okay. Even if I choose poorly, making an apology and correcting the situation will only bruise my ego most of all. And it's better that my ego take the beating than my relationships. Plus, making mistakes regularly is a good way to get feedback and learn more about your boundaries and limitations.

Lesson Number 6: Communicate with Utter Transparency

Okay. Now, this may seem extreme, but following this lesson is definitely worth the extra hassle. I speak all the time, abstractly, about how we, as constituent parts, make up some larger whole that we may not be able to perceive. I like to think that we're working on the Body of Christ or some sort of cosmic harmonization. The trick is making that happen. And to do it, we need communication as our bridge.

Now, I don't just mean standard communication here, giving somebody the pure information on something. I mean a deep sense of knowing, to the point where you being to think with other people in mind nearly all the time. When you reach for a selection of cheese in the grocery store, what criteria do you use to make a selection? It's a small choice. No one here is lactose-intolerant or allergic. But, even here, would you think about what other people want? I'm finally getting to a point where I do.

I have a whole library in the back of my head now about mannerisms and preferences. These things let me know where a conflict can be, not only avoided, but prevented altogether, or where spirits can be lifted or where something valuable can be taught or learned. When there's a whole house of people thinking in such ways, it's heaven and everything runs like a well-oiled machine. We become one Body. For anyone even considering giving some time to a L'Arche community, this experience of "work-think togetherness," just by itself, make the whole thing worth it.

Lesson Number 7: BE Present

It's easy for a young guy like me to make all kinds of plans about what might happen in the future or what I'd like to see happen, but I often forget about the things that I'm doing right now. Granted, a load of dishes doesn't seem as important as ontological reasoning, but it can be if it's done right. In any team, it sucks to have a slacker on board; someone who doesn't pull their weight.

This is two-fold. First, there is the immediate notice that there's extra work for everyone else to do which makes life harder in a direct sense. But, second, the fact that this one person isn't paying attention is essentially a slap in the face. It says, "Whatever we're doing now is less important to me than something else. I don't value you," which adds insult to injury and can destroy the rapport of the collective whole.

When I'm distracted, it hurts people. In the abstract, I should have known it would be so because distraction makes me irresponsible. That is, in thinking about or doing something else, i lose my ability to respond. Being irresponsible hurts people, pure and simple. As people, you and I are valuable. We need to own and respect that value as it is.

The whole, the collective society or body, needs us to do the work that the parts are supposed to do, or else it cannot function. The relationships that you have right now are therefore the most important ones, since they're the only ones that have the power to do work in the actual world that we live in. Which is not to say that we ought to never think about the future. We just have to make sure that thinking about the future is a function of where we're at now.

Lesson Number 8: You Were Made to Live, Not Learn

You know, you can always count on me to wrap things up with something totally paradoxical. For me, this lesson is the most important one right now. That is, it's the one most on my mind at the moment.

I've said before that we don't need to be smart of important to contribute to the cosmic processes of creativity. I find that it is more true each day. I used to believe that, so long as I came away from something with some kind of life lesson, then my time was well spent. But if people are hurt, then that's just not the case. It's not loving that ought to conclude in learning, but rather, learning should be a function of primarily loving.

People do not want to learn. What we want is to love. We want to be connected. We want to commit and we want to belong. Looking at the cosmos as a whole and the sheer number of possibilities that there are in this universe, I am under the constant need to remember how small I am. The amount of force that it would take to end my life is, literally, next to nothing. I am fragile and small and silent. Given that, why do we make so much of the differences between ourselves? Sex, race, gender, class, ethnicity, creed, ability level...

We must want some place to put our little tiny corner of life. Those differences must be important somehow because, sure, I'm very small. But, you know, I've still got what I've got and I really want to do something with it. After all, it's all about Gift. Gift given and Gift received.

This is not to say that learning is always about self-validation. It's not. But if you can love without the need to be validated in any capacity, including the need to learn, then, (in my opinion) you're set, friend.

Catch Up

Well...

I guess it's been a long long time since I've done a personal post. So, I'd like to do that now, instead of just my abstract, philosophical ones.

It's winter here in Paraparaumu again and, tonight, I lit the fireplace for the first time this season. As I type this, there is a detectable difference in temperature between our kitchen and our lounge as one walks from one room to the other. I arrived here in the dead of winter, in a rainstorm. Today, there was another such storm and, seeing it, I was given pause to reflect on my first year at L'Arche Kapiti.

I've worked and lived here under two different house leaders and I've come to know nine core members, as well as over a dozen fellow assistants. I've seen the passing of a torch from one community leader to another and I've also watched as we gained four new community council members. In my year here so far, we lost a house, we kept our Community Participation Service, we bid farewell to one core member, and welcomed another one. I've gained few new friends and said goodbye to a good number as well.

The most pressing question at this point would seem to be, "How am I doing?" ... I'm doing okay. I've learned alot about myself in this year and a great deal about God. L'Arche definitely isn't what I thought it would be. I figured, when I began here, that I'd put in my time, get an experience, and then continue on the road of my career, one step closer to developing my "theology of vulnerability." I still might do that, but I could have figured then that the experience of being as vulnerable as possible might lead me to change some things. Of course, it did.

While I may have graduated from Hastings with a perfect GPA and a little gold honor stamped on to my BA, I knew that none of that would matter here. I was right, but the feeling of knowing that definitely hurts more than I expected. My primary discovery this year was, of course, my sense of disability. During this year, I have experienced times when my motivation has been robbed from me. A sort of depressive state where my lists of things to do will pile up and continue piling up. I know what I ought to do, but cannot find the motivation to do so. These are times I have experienced before being in L'Arche. This feeling is recurrent. The difference this time around is that I have come to understand it. I know it and can live with it. I can safely depend on other people to help me. I do not have to pretend that these times of depression, confusion, indecision, or hopelessness do not occur. They do. By living as I am within this community, I now understand that I cannot run or hide from my weaknesses. I can, however, welcome them. I can also be welcomed with them, into the Body of Christ.

Around Easter this year, we had our annual community foot-washing ceremony. Leighanne was the one who was responsible for washing my feet. It was strange to me. Intellectually, I understood the process of course. I knew all the symbolism of what was taking place and it fit very comfortably within my worldview. Practically, however, I still carried alot of tension in that moment. Being cared for by a core member is the exact opposite of what my body is used to practicing. That was a powerful and provocative moment for me.

This process of discovery has taken longer than usual for an assistant in L'Arche. Based on my own observations and those that I have collected from others, I'd venture a guess that the usual time of traction for a new assistant from the time that they arrive to the time when they understand and can "live community" is about two to three months. For me, I was 7 months into this thing before I even started to get it. There was even a time that I was actually put on a kind of assistant's probation. My inability to live community threw into question whether or not I would be welcomed back for a second year, even though I have wished to do so for a while now. I have never failed so much at any other endeavor in my entire life.

Once I knew that my disability was somehow damaging the community, however, it didn't take long for me to muster a response. I was deeply provoked, just as I knew that, somehow, I would be. Things are better now, but I've got a longer road ahead. I have been welcomed back for another year at L'Arche Kapiti. It's ironic that we would often think first, of the long road that our core member have, dealing with their disabilities, yet we'd seldom look at our own. This realization also sheds light on another that I've gained: It's never the folks with intellectual disabilities that you can't live with. For them, we make it work; we find a way. More typical people, by contrast, we'll always have conflict with. It's my fellow assistants who are, consistently, the most difficult people in my life. I've always appreciated razor-sharp irony and, here, I chuckle and stand agape at its bleeding edge.

After studying Religion and Ethics; the Transcendent and the Other, I came here to put myself within closer proximity to both. In realizing my difficulties with "normal" people, I have also come to understand that "Other" isn't reserved to a particular class of people. We find Others, strangers, enemies (ghosts) everywhere we go. Your Others are your co-workers, your family members, your friends, your neighbors.

In that, I have also realized Gift. As I've stated in other posts, it's never people's ability levels that matter, only their gifts. And, just as you can find Others close-at-hand, you can also find gifts. Gift is everywhere. It's been written that "faith is the conviction of things not yet seen." I've come to realized that even the faith to look for Gift is, itself, a gift. How do we know that looking for another's gifts will be a genuinely good exercise? You take that process of searching on faith, then your faith itself becomes a gift, right? Well, it would seem that way to me.

Assuming that everything goes smoothly with my visa acquisition, I've got another year ahead now and I'm looking forward to it and all of the challenges that it will bring me. In one month's time, I'll be heading back to the US for a visit while I take a month's leave. I plan on using this time to collect myself further and prepare for the future that lies ahead. There are pieces of me all along this journey. I leave a little something at each place and with each person. Accordingly, I take something from each person and each stage. I love all of you.

Photo Jam 5

I am LONG overdue for a post of some pictures. Also, I have a back-log of pictures that I've been meaning to put up. So... another photo jam post!

For New Years Eve, I went to Sydney, Australia and camped out all day in front of the Opera House to get a good spot for the fireworks. It was great. Umbrella? Check. Picnic blanket? Check. And, to top it all off, an extremely smart friend of mine remembered to freeze some grapes to help us stave off the hot (summer, in the southern hemisphere) sun.

Sydney's Taronga zoo was really sweet. They've got Platypi, Koalas, Giraffes, and this Komodo Dragon. (Which was about 6-feet long!)

More from the zoo. This time a bit more traditionally "outback." This is a Wallaby (perhaps it's name is "Rocko"). It's cute. I've heard it said that everything in Australia either hops or is deadly poisonous. This would be the former.

Creative picnic food idea: Put Nutella on your pikelets. (For the uninitiated, pikelets are miniature, sweetened versions of pancakes. They is good.)

While at the Opera House, we saw what was, apparently, Colonel Sanders having a stroll on the balcony. I'd like to think that he was invited to the New Years gala, but then couldn't help himself and walked out to survey the Sydney skyline and fantasize about where all his new KFCs were going to go. "I'll put one there...and there..."

The famous Harbor Bridge. The New Years Eve fireworks were launched from it. Spectacular. According to news reports the next day, it was the largest NYE celebration on earth, attracting 1.5 Million people. :)

The is the shoreline of Kaikoura, a famous fishing community in New Zealand's South Island. Gorgeous. Also, I've heard that the crayfish here is excellent.

A while back, I traveled the upper portion of the South Island by getting a really sweet deal on a camper van from a company here called "Spaceships." This was the vessel of travel they offered: "Cassiopeia." View it in all it's bright-orange, mommy-mobile majesty!

Somewhere in Hamilton, New Zealand, at this ordinary-seeming mall, a young Nebraskan man is making his first ever balloon animal: a blue puppy dog. Yeah, I'm very proud of myself. I had very good instruction, however, so I shouldn't be surprised. After this photo was shot, we started offering our "balloon creations" free to the general public. Parents were leery, but children were happy.

Okay, so this one is from WAY back in late August, but I just had to show you all the gigantic replica carrot, put up in beautiful Ohakune (near Mt. Ruapehu), which is basically just a ski village, so the carrot does tend to stand out. Take that, Carhenge!

Ability and Gift (As Paradigms)

Initially, I thought that this post would have to be longer, but really, I only have one serious point to make. It won't be long or complicated, since I've discovered that the topic I really want to get at is God and vulnerability. This discussion of Ability and Gift is really just a major stepping-stone in that direction.

Here at L'Arche, we read alot of Jean Vanier and his descriptions of the "spirituality of L'Arche."

The problem with digesting this material is two-fold: (A) Jean Vanier speaks to a very specfic, often Roman Catholic audience and there aren't that many assistants here who are themselves Roman Catholic, and (B) Vanier isn't a typical "philosopher" type, so those points that he does make about spirituality come in various writings and collections of thoughts. The arrive only piecemeal in the minds of assistants. For us at L'Arche Kapiti, a few are from the book Community and Growth, but for the most part, we draw on a lecture that Vanier gave in 1991 called "The Poor at the Heart of L'Arche."

I'd say I'm unique here in that the majority of the assistants who currently work under L'Arche Kapiti would tend to self-identify as Secular Humanist, Atheist, Agnostic, or Non-Religious. While these folks are definitely committed to L'Arche just as much as any "religious" person would be, there tends to be a disconnect between the spiritual language used by Jean Vanier and our own experiences as assistants on the ground floor of the organization. Primarily, the problem lies in all this language of "poverty."

L'Arche is living in family with people who have been rejected, regarded as foolish, looked down upon, put away by society.

-"The Poor at the Heart of L'Arche" p.2

The relationship with people who are broken and in anguish reveals to us our own brokenness, our own darkness and our own poverty.

-"The Poor at the Heart of L'Arche" p.18

While I don't think that any L'Arche assistant would disagree with these statements directly, we do tend to question the supposed "poverty" of our core members. I have heard my fellow assistants say, time and again, "These people are not poor, they are very capable in many ways." And I, for one, completely agree.

But I can't deny that Vanier has a very good point. The reason we're here, after all, is to be a kind of alternative vision to what the rest of our society tends to do, which is disregard the humanity of those who have disabilities. We do (and need to) acknowledge this sense of "disability" in order to have a L'Arche in the first place. Once inside, however, the lines of disability get very blurry. Are disabled people disabled or not? Are their assistants disabled or not? The answer to both, on a day-to-day basis seems to be both "yes" and "no." We ad-hoc it to make the community go when we need it to go, but we lack a real sense of clarity with regard to our language around ability and disability. What I'd like to do here is to take those questions and find a "hidden, third way." To reframe them in light of my philosophical influences to shed more light on what, exactly, I think I'm doing here.

The problem with the above questions is precisely that that they revolve around a language of the status quo: the language of Ability. The very paradigm that L'Arche wants to overturn is that of categorizing people based on who is more able than whom. If that's the case, then we have to put on some new spectacles. We can't answer questions about "ability" if that's the very thing we want to disregard.

So, instead, let's take a cue from Jean Luc Marion and put in some language of (you guessed it if you've read the title) Gift. In a social, spiritual, and (for me) religious sense, the economy of Ability is rendered completely irrelevant when we start to look at phenomenon in terms of Gift.

For starters, let me just say that there really are differences in ability from person to person. Moreover, the practice of Ethics requires that we acknowledge them. I love my housemate, Julie. The reality is that Julie simply cannot do mathematics. Her brain doesn't work that way and, yes, her overall abilities will probably always be less than those of her assistants. We wouldn’t want to trivialize disability by saying that “we’re all disabled.” That’s an easy road and is also an injustice because it denies the reality of people’s lives and the frustrations that they face. We all face frustrations with ourselves, of course, knowing our limitations. We need to acknowledge these, to accept them, in order to truly live. To tie this in with my last post, it's important to acknowledge that no matter how much I want to be "free" of my being, I never will be. I am not truly free. And, for the record, no, I don't need to be free. Without such limitations, personhood just isn't personhood.

The burden of proof for L'Arche as an alternative community (a branch of the Body of Christ, a piece of the Kingdom of God), however, doesn't rest on the back of Ability. It rests on Gift. And that's because Ability is a shifting sand. If people don't "measure up," then they have to be cast aside, unable to contribute to the whole of society. This, I think, is the brokenness which Vanier describes. Gift, by contrast, is a firm foundation because it acknowledges uniqueness by disregarding the measuring stick. You don't have to "measure up" to have gifts, you just have to be the provocative Self that you already are. Every accepted gift changes the very way in which we do the measuring, making the measuring a far less-important gesture.

I've mentioned the size-scale of Being before, using a language that describes differing "levels of Being." I'd like to use that again as a metaphorical aid here, so I'll be talking about "cells" (individuals, components) and "bodies" (wholes, collectives).

For cells, Ability is important because it determines their survival in a given environment. Without necessary Ability, cells die. I say that Gift is always more important than Ability, but that is only for bodies; the whole; the collective cells; the aggregate. For the individual; the component; Ability is, naturally, the greatest qualifier for happiness and well-being. Yet, it is not Ability that makes a body. Rather, it is Gift that, as Paul so put it, creates specialization (the "many parts" bit). A blood cell looks at a brain cell and figures that it must be really poor because it's so bad at absorbing Oxygen. The brain cell thinks likewise about the blood cell's lack of ion channels. The Amoeba looks at them both and figures they'll make an easy meal, if not for that pesky immune system, but the Amoeba can't help them all to make a whole body and, therefore, misses the point of this fictional conversation.

These differences in Gift from one cell to the next that create specialization also create a need for relationships, since-rather than surviving on their own, the components discover a need to survive together. The discovery of weakness is a goad which prompts a larger level of Being to com into its existence. And here's where Gift can become apparent. Any difference between two components can only be perceived by one as a lack of Ability in the other. A collective body, however (looking back down the chain) can understand how the uniqueness of each contributes to all. L'Arche doesn't need Julie to do math. Julie doesn't need me to teach her. But what L'Arche needs; what the Body of Christ (the Kingdom of God, the Just Society, the Good Neighborhood) needs, is for us to know one another; to be in relationship. We find the gaps, we provoke one another, we contribute to the larger Being.

So, I say: Let's knock off all this talk about differences in ability. Yes, it's good to understand what we're good at, just as it's good to understand what our limits (read: disabilities) are. That's a normal process. But it's not what we came to the party for. If it were, then we'd spend the whole of our existence just replicating, fighting back everyone who seems to hold a different level of ability than ourselves. In other words: we'd all be fundamentalists, just wearing differently-colored tee shirts. I don't intend to simply swap one form of Empire for another. I feel that the overall intention of God is to overturn Empire itself and make all things new. (And, yes, I acknowledge that that is my particular, very subjective world-view. I'm just being honest about what that world-view is.)

Having traded "teams" a number of times in all manner of conversations, political, social, cultural, and religious, I don't particularly care about the labels anymore. Every form of Empire is as bad as the next. The real answers are too sticky, complicated, and interwoven to encapsulate in any one ideology or collection of thought. Christians: Yes, secular people look strange to you. No, their existence will not benefit you. Non-religious folks: Yes, religious people look strange to you. No, their existence will not benefit you. The same thing goes for both the disabled and the enhanced. The same thing goes for those of different nationalities, races, sexes, genders, sexual orientations, and so on.

But NO, no one has the right to erect an empire over anyone else because, if you came to this party, then it's the party itself that happens, not you. At the same time, being ourselves, we really can't help but replicate. We're all imperial in some capacity. We're all different. We're all limited. Most important for the life of the party (the body, the society): We're all gifted.

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Before I close this post, I'd like to clarify my thoughts on freedom from the last one. I've said that people don't need to be free in order to be good. That, at some essential level, we're all basically caged anyway. But what I ought to write down is that just because free wills don't exist, that doesn't mean that Freedom itself doesn't exist. It does and it is important.

I think that the phenomenon of Freedom, the desire for us to be "free," comes into play when we are not allowed to respond (not allowed to have responsibility) by circumstances that we also can change. For instance, a man with a large family goes to prison. Within the barred walls, he makes little to nothing for his dependents. He feels trapped because, despite the fact that a great many vulnerabilities occur to him, he cannot respond to them. Robbed of his responsibilities, he feels worthless. He wishes only to be "free" again and, when released, feels a wave of freedom settle into his sense of self.

The thing that I did not intend with my earlier writing was to whitewash and baptize the actions of every charismatic cultist and nationalist despot, simply because they all create collectives from groups of people. I merely intend to highlight some of the deeper existential boundaries of being human.

Up next in this "deeper" series of posts, I'll get into a sketch of God as, not the ultimate cosmic Power, but rather, the ultimate cosmic Responsibility.

The Responsible (As Opposed to "Free") Will

So, here are the beginnings of the things I’m putting together for myself and collecting into a (semi) systematic worldview. I’m going to start here (again) with Dennett as a launching point. Let’s being in earnest and talk about the will.

I’m almost sick to death now of the quest for free will. This is mostly because I’m much more concerned with being ethical than being free. I can credit my incessant need (perhaps addiction) to constantly question morality and uncover Ethics to one particular influence: Emmanuel Levinas. As those of you who read my papers and these blog entries will no doubt know already, Levinas continually astounds me with his cleverness at avoiding a metaphysical projects. Instead of saying that Ethics is a kind of system, he turns his thoughts outward and takes Ethics really seriously in saying that it is founded on things (Others, with a capital ‘O’) that we literally cannot think about. He cuts through all the nonsense and bull crap and beating around the bush that usually goes along with doing philosophy and brings us right to the very edges of our imaginations; to the unknown, the hard places. If “moral” means “confidence” in its French etymology, then this is not a place in which we can have any confidence at all. I continue to be impressed by the courageousness expressed in this thinking.

I say I’m sick of the quest for “free” will because it seems like everyone I meet, layperson or scholar, needs to somehow come up with a justification for it, as if it’s a vital organ that might blink out of existence if we stop believing in it. Perhaps it’s a deep-seated psychological need to be independent or perhaps it’s the leftover memetic traces of the Enlighenment period that gave us “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” but whatever it is, it seems that the desire to be free, above all else, has gotten quite stuck into us, especially in the western world where we’re all considered as individuals. Now, for the purposes of this little manifesto, let me completely cut through all of that and just come out with my position: The free will is an illusion. “Free will” is a contradiction of terms.

Why do I say that? Well, I don’t mean to step on any toes here, I just don’t understand the paradox. Remember Levinas? Well, he was largely the philosophical heir to another guy named Edmund Husserl. Husserl was a minor revolutionary figure because he treated knowledge, not as the result of observations, but as a phenomenon by itself. The question of how knowledge is formed quickly leads one to ask how consciousness is formed. (How do you know that you know something, anyway?) Well, the major conclusion here is that consciousness cannot exist by itself. Go ahead, try it. Try to just be conscious. What this exercise ought to demonstrate is that, in order to be conscious, you need to be conscious of something. Heidegger and Levinas both expand this realization to the level of Being. You can’t just “be,” you have to be about something. Imagine trying to sense without having intention. You’ve got a sense of smell, you’ve got a sense of sound, you’ve got a sense of sight, but what you don’t have is a completely objective “sense” that just hangs out in space, unaffected by particulars. Rather than being unaffected by particulars, your senses have been shaped by particulars.

Let’s define some terms before we go any further. I’m using a definition of the term “free” here that essentially means “unbound.” Freed birds, for example, become untied, freed prisoners become unshackled, etc. Now, “responsibility” here simply means “the ability to respond.” If a friend speaks to me and I turn away so that I can’t listen, then we’d say that such an action isn’t fair. It’s just not responsible, because I’m not responding. What about a definition of will? What makes a will? Well, if consciousness can’t exist by itself and being can’t exist by itself, then certainly it must hold (as an aspect of both Being and consciousness) that will cannot exist by itself either. In other words, just as you have to be conscious of something, so too you cannot simply have will, but must will something. Will must be a desire toward some end. You will goodness. You will love. You will peace. You will toward a better world and a better life and those desires are completely acceptable and understandable.

So here’s the paradox I don’t understand: If the will must be about something, if it must be tied to some goal or striving (intention), then it cannot also be free (unbound) at the same time. Free will is like a free slave: there’s no such thing.

Now, having said that, I can understand why we would want to be free. It seems easy to be free, with nothing to tie us down. Freedom means no worries and no waste. We want to have more choices and more options in answering the questions of our lives. We believe that freer people have more choices and more options to make these choices. But are those with more options also freer? Do democratic voters have more degrees of freedom than their counterparts in totalitarian regimes? On the contrary! Democracies are not freer than Autocracies. An autocratic system need only be responsible to the desires of one, but a democracy needs to be responsible to the desires of all. That’s not more freedom, it’s less freedom. Why? Because it ties this new gestalt being of society down by so many more chains; it must respond to so many more intentions. Instead of being a servant with only one master, as its autocratic peer is, a democratic system is a servant with millions of masters.

Then why do we say that democracy is a good way to go? Why do we want to replace fascism with civic participation? What’s all the fuss about? I, for one, posit that we naturally desire civic participation over mindless, autocratic droning precisely because it makes us more responsible. We want to be responsible, because we want to have intentions. We want a will. Indeed, if we did not intend then we simply wouldn’t be.

(To draw upon my own Christian tradition for a moment: If God is the ultimate collective of the cosmos, then isn’t it better to have a God who “comes to be a servant” as the Gospel of John says? It seems only natural that a God who is ultimately responsible morally would also utter the words, “I have come to serve, not to be served.” This sentiment rings true for me now in so many ways because it deeply reflects the outlook of Jean Vanier and L’Arche. Rather than seeking to win and have victories, we begin down the “descent into littleness.”)

Why do we want to be more responsible if having a will also restricts our freedom? Let’s take a society’s-eye view of the situation. Pretend, for a moment, that you are a total society. “You” have become the collective of desires that make up a whole human social system; you are that servant with either one or millions of masters. We’ll compare the two variations in a second. Now, since you’re alive (people “made” you, you exist), let’s also apply the principles of evolution to you as an entity: You, as a society, want to survive, regardless of the survival of any one individual citizen. You’re like the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The individual people (think of them as “cells”) who constitute you can come and go, but you must carry on somehow as a whole.

If you’re an autocratic society, then you’re going to experience a very hard and probably very short life. If your autocrat goes, so do you. And, as opposed to the democratic society, you’re much more likely to die or become seriously injured. In the event of a coup or invasion, you’re history. Even without a complete death, with regime handovers, you’re going to be experiencing a lot of mood swings and unnecessary pains. What about the democratic society? Well, in that case, you’ve got a much longer life ahead of you. Social problems can be noticed through civic participation and they no longer need to fester until blowing up into a full-on regime turnover or coup. Change can happen more gradually. You’ll feel much more in tune with your desires and needs. And it’s all because you’re simply more responsible. Of course any servant with so many masters must be clever in order to survive. After all, they all want different and often competing things from you. As a democracy, you’ll have to strike deals and compromise constantly, but you’ll be smarter for the efforts; much better adapted for survival than your autocratic cousin.

At least part of the reason why Dennett and others go down the track of making free will and determinism compatible is because they want to explain the phenomenon of human morality: our shaming, praising, and blaming. Because, before answering questions concerning morality of whether or not we should shame, praise, or blame, we’ve got to understand why these things happen in the first place. Dennett figures we can get there by having more freedom. But, in order to achieve and reasonably explain human blaming and shaming, we needn’t come up with a good sense of “free,” we need only achieve a good sense of “responsible.” Indeed, this is the very thing that blaming, rewarding, and shaming work toward. They are ways in which we become able to respond to the Others that surround us (other people, other cultures, other species, our environment, etc.).

I’ve heard the argument too that substituting in responsibility for freedom takes away our human capabilities of agency. But, just as with consciousness, what makes a person into an agent is intention. There is no such thing as a plain, purely objective agent. Again, a person would have to be an agent of something. Consciousness is not by itself, we must be conscious of something. Reponsibility is not by itself, it must be responsible to something. Agency is not by itself, we must be an agent of something.

So, let’s just do away with this desire for freedom. Why worry about increasing our freedom when what we really want is just more responsibility? Dennett’s big claim in Freedom Evolves is that the whole can be freer than its parts. At first, I agreed wholeheartedly, but now I understand that any whole is not necessarily more free. The one thing a whole is, however, is much more responsible. Personally, I can’t understand the experience of a person who lives in poor, rural Uganda. If, however, that person has the right to vote and participate in the same society as I do, then “I” don’t have to be responsible because my society can pick up the slack merely by having a vote tied to that person’s intentions. In being more vulnerable, a gestalt whole can be more responsible; more vulnerable than I could ever be as a single person. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to be personally responsible to that other person, only that I don’t have to be in order to achieve agency.

Presumably, we must be agents of something “larger” than our “selves.” These larger levels of being (biosphere, society, cosmos) make agents of the smaller. What we would not want is to be agents of this or lower levels of being. I would not want to be an agent of another human individual or a hermit crab, for instance. That would be ridiculous and harmful. But it’s perfectly alright if that hermit crab, that other person, and I are all agents of our society. We should not make the easy mistake (as Dennett and Kane, among others) do of conflating the concepts of flexibility and freedom. A simple increase in our flexibility does not necessarily stem from an increase in our freedom. Freedom is not required to increase a being’s flexibility. All that is required is an increase in its responsibility. The free will is an illusion. A free will isn’t because a will isn’t free and freedom doesn’t have a will. Even if that wasn’t that case, free will is not worth wanting since an unbound and invulnerable will cannot give us the responsibility we crave as moral beings.

Personally, I believe that God is the most ultimately responsible kind of being imaginable; the most ultimately vulnerable. I also believe that this sort of ultimate responsibility is what we long for most in all of our human striving. More on this topic to come, however.

My experience in L’Arche confirms and guides me in these conclusions. If I weren’t here while thinking this, I might still have come to the conclusion that a free will is worth wanting. Being here, however, I can see that it is certainly not. Who is free? Certainly not I and not anyone else I have ever met. Our world is a determined world, full of casual connections and correlations. We can observe patterns and create knowledge from them. Those are the “facts” of our lives. We’re not supernaturally special beings, even if we are spiritual ones. We’re made from the same stuff as the stars and planets and the scrub brush and the nematodes and corals. It’s all determined. It’s all bound up in influences, chemical, physical, biological, cultural, etc. Likewise, you and I are determined as well because, as members of creation, we’re bound up right in there with everything else. Your body is determined, your brain is determined, you are determined. Because you exist and because you have intentions, you can’t be free, not truly free, anyway. But why would you want to be when all you really need is to be responsible? You don’t need to be free to participate in the cosmic project of creativity. In fact, if you were free, then that would take you out of the game entirely and I’ve never heard of anyone who likes being lonely.

L’Arche has shown and is showing me that I am bound in so many ways, that I must be responsible; be vulnerable in a myriad of interwoven and complex matrices of existence. You don’t have to look very far to discover all the things that influence you and who you are and how you are. The concept of disability, for instance, is a great bind. In L’Arche, as I’ve said before, people learn to discover their own disabilities. There are things that hold me back, things about my character that I’ll probably never be able to change or compensate for. If it were possible to know and love my friend Julie without her William’s Syndrome, then we would want that, of course. We don’t want people to be disabled, because that would be a kind of abuse to use another person for our own desires. The point however is that there is no way for me to meet Julie without the William’s Syndrome. It’s just a part of who she is. By the same token, I imagine that there are lots of folks who would rather that my cynicism and negativity and selfishness just weren’t there. But, hey, they are there. Whether lodged into me genetically or learned as behaviors, a lot of my disabling character traits are just here to stay. Does that mean I don’t feel loved? Does that mean that I can’t find a place in the world (or in the Body of Christ)? Of course not, because, in addition to our shortcomings of ability, we all have something important to reveal. We all have this amazing feature known as Gift. I’ve explained it somewhat before, using what I know from Jean Luc Marion, but I’ll try to articulate exactly what I mean more in my next post. So, now that we’ve taken care of free will and replaced it with responsible will, the next part will be on the phenomenon of ability and gift.