I really understand how people who have grown up in a faith
tradition can be so formed by that tradition that it is imponderable to
consider throwing over the traces and abandoning it. They stick with it despite
centuries of abuse, hypocrisy, even crime. To the outsider, such loyalty might
seem utterly stupid. They suppose that only the stubborn, the simple, or the
fearful would be immovably lodged in such a place, bonded to institutions that
they would even advise others to repudiate were others yoked to such
communities. Their rationales for remaining sound to others like the excuses of
abused spouses, sticking with their marriage vows, hoping that someday he'll
change, or that love might at last have the effect of wooing her towards a
kinder life, or just plain inertia.
It isn't, of course, just religious traditions that have
such a lock on people. But they are alone among the inventions of humanity the
systems most likely to give deep meaning to life, storehouses of stories that
address complexities that cannot be faced by reason alone. They are
repositories of myths, symbols, rites that adorn ordinary lives and punctuate
days and years with celebrations. It is interesting how when people whose
intellect and integrity have steered them away from any trace of religious
practice will, at the time of death, naturally borrow elements of a
long-discredited tradition in order to shape their mourning, if is nothing more
than the adaptation of the old impulse to gather and verbalize the meaning of a
dead friend's life or a lover's importance. Notice how people in purely secular
environments will arrange chairs in a way that perhaps even unconsciously
replicates an ancient experience of religious community.
Human beings have evolved to be storytellers. All of our
literature, all of our structured games, the entirety of our art, even the
debased and vulgar forms we keep inventing to pretend communication--tweeting
comes to mind--are born of the desire to tell each other for good or ill, false
or true, information we on some level consider worth passing on.
I am a product of a religious tradition, one might say
several, in fact. And for nearly half a century I've been a religious
functionary. God knows and I know how easy it is to justify wrongdoing, to
excuse oneself from following rules sanctioned for all but applied only to
others. It is possible but not easy to encounter people at their most
vulnerable and not be tempted at least in the mind to exploit that
vulnerability to feed some gnawing hunger in the pit of one's soul. But in all
honesty, I have trouble seeing how day after day, week after week, season in
and season out, people can perform rites and intone liturgies and propound
sacred texts without somehow realizing that the point of all the cultic
paraphernalia is to lead human beings to be better to ourselves and to each
other than, left to our native impulses, we generally are. Leaders who betray
us, charismatic tongues and compelling visions aside, lead us way past
temptation and into the pitch of damnation and ought to be, must be, called
out.
Often the only ones thus calling out are those who are
self-sidelined from the systems, those who either disdain them by nature or
have sickened to the point of leaving. I respect them for bearing their own
witness to Integrity. But even they who don't identify with faith traditions or
religious institutions continue to be human--frequently exemplary humans--and
as humans they have the same need for meaning, the same pains to endure, the
same mortality to face, the same challenge to cope as those who salve their
consciences through religious rites and spiritual discipline.
An old discredited heresy in the Church is that of Donatism.
Donatists held that the moral defects and flaws of clergy who betrayed their
communities by surrendering their custodianship of holy tradition had the
effect of invalidating any of the sacraments such clergy administered. I see
the point of Donatism but don't want to be a Donatist myself. I have lived, and
still do live, with the knowledge that some have looked me in the face--well
not exactly in my face--and in effect have said, "You betrayed me. So I
thought you were straight. And lo you are queer. And thus I declare you a
hypocrite. I renounce you." I cannot deny (my dreams won't let me) that my
heart is stung still by the part of me that was the superego driven Good Boy
who wanted desperately to do the right thing and hoped in the process to win
approval. I don't want to drop into another hole by casting stones from my own
glass house. I take no joy in failing to forgive others as I have been
forgiven. I am not talking about God. I am talking about me, and the thanks I
owe to a community and a host of friends who have embraced me despite knowing a
Frank they once didn't know so well.
I have just given you an example of how faith has formed me.
It has not made me superior to anybody else on the planet. But it has made me
from an early age acutely aware that telling the Truth is inseparable from
honor itself. Lying, preying on the defenseless, cloaking one's misdoings in
self-righteousness, self-aggrandizement, and shameless exploitation of one's
own status are not just sins of the flesh, if by flesh is meant ordinary bodily
life. They are some of the unconscionable behaviors that destroy human
community, weaken the very fibers that hold us together, and mock the human
soul struggling to find meaning, if not enlightenment, in this life.
I am not about to be convinced that this is a condition that
can be chalked off to what Mark Twain called "ordinary human
cussedness," the excuse that "humans will be humans" just as
they always have been. There is such a thing as human culpability and
"ordinary cussedness" and it is pervasive. But there is also such a
thing as accountability. And those to whom others entrust leadership are those
of whom accountability must be required.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2019
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