Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Regarding Mr. Akin

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This, Mr. Akin, is what rape feels like.
This, Mr. Akin, is what rape feels like.

It has never been my intention in my writing to enter the political fray. I prefer to draw people’s attention to the life of mindfulness, compassion, and wonder. But the recent uproar about the comments of Rep. Todd Akin regarding rape has prompted me to make an exception to my norm and say a word or two.

I can understand why Mr. Akin’s comments have offended, incensed, and wounded so many people. Along with millions of women in this country, I, too, have experienced rape, and Mr. Akin’s beliefs about rape and pregnancy reveal a profound level of ignorance and insensitivity on his part. Others have written eloquently and powerfully about that, so I won’t go into it.

But as a former pastor, what I have found myself asking is why he and so many other devoutly religious people cling to beliefs that are simply erroneous. Why are facts so blithely tossed aside and ignorance so aggressively guarded?

I think to answer that question I need to look not at their political views or even ideology, but at their theology. I suspect that Mr. Akin’s belief that women can’t get pregnant from rape arises out of a firm belief that God will protect the righteous. God, in this worldview, is the Intelligent Designer and therefore “He” must have built into women’s anatomy a protection mechanism against the catastrophe of pregnancy resulting from rape. God, in this worldview, is omnipotent, just, and good, therefore, if bad things happen it must be because the person had it coming to them.

It is a simplistic, Pollyanna theology that simply refuses to accommodate itself to the very real facts of oppression and cruelty. Rather than facing the hard challenges that theodicy presents, this theology skirts the issue by blaming suffering on those who suffer. It may well be that Mr. Akin and those who hold similar viewpoints aren’t simply trying to prevent unwanted fetuses from being aborted. They are trying to protect their understanding of God.

This understanding of God, however, is not a Judeo-Christian understanding. The book of Job, perhaps the most ancient piece of writing in the Judeo-Christian canon, addresses this very issue, and it is unwaveringly clear: bad things happen to good people; God does not necessarily protect the righteous.

If Job had been written with a woman protagonist, one of the horrors visited upon her may very well have been rape, with the compounding catastrophe of a resulting pregnancy, and her friends would have tried to convince her that she must have done something wrong or this never would have happened, or that perhaps her rape wasn’t really legitimately rape or she wouldn’t have gotten pregnant.

Jesus, too, challenged those who would blame suffering on the victims, and of course his own crucifixion at the hands of the Roman Empire was a graphic display of the truth that God doesn’t protect the righteous.  The conventional Christian resolution of this dilemma has been to claim that, instead of protecting those who suffer, God suffers with them, which is the literal meaning of compassion, something that has become tremendously lacking in the politics of our day.

Anyone who advocates for the idea that this should be a Christian nation would, by definition, have to have compassion — suffering with the suffering — at the centerpiece of their political platform.

I was fortunate. I didn’t get pregnant. But it never entered my mind that if I had I would have been forced to carry the fetus of my rapist in my body. Such a sentence was unthinkable, unconscionable, and the belief that such cruel and unusual punishment should be written into the Constitution, as some would like it to be, is abhorrent to me. Whether or not a woman seeks an abortion in such circumstances is not Rep. Akin’s decision, nor any other politician’s, to make. It is hers, and hers alone.

But there is something else that has been present in my mind these last few days. It is a memory I carry with me from a time, several years ago, when I was on spiritual retreat.

I was walking the labyrinth one day and a message came to me saying: “Release all concept of enemy.” It was a revelation, because it was telling me that “enemy” is a concept I hold, a frame of reference in my mind, not something inherently real. Since then I must have taken the teaching to heart because, even though I vehemently disagree with Mr. Akin’s stance and I do not want him to be in a position of political power nor his beliefs codified into legislation, I have been unable to see him as an enemy. In an odd way, I can even sympathize with him. I can understand his desire to live in a world where things make sense, where complexities, such as abortion, can be boiled down to simple absolutes, where rape and other such atrocities can be explained away. That is not the world we live in, but the point I want to make is that I see him as someone not entirely dissimilar to myself, someone who, like me, wants his life to have meaning and needs something to believe in, a human being who is not more and not less than any other.

If I want him to do the hard work of wrestling honestly with the suffering of others and the complexities it presents, I must be willing to do the hard work that my beliefs demand of me: recognizing that we are all members of one human family. His name itself places the challenge before me: to see him as a kin.

 

 

Getting to the Roots

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Without its roots the tree will die.

Christmastide is ending today, the twelfth day of Christmas, and this weekend our Christmas tree will be coming down to be recycled. Surprisingly, even though it’s been up for almost three weeks, it is still drinking water and hasn’t yet begun dropping its needles. I know, though, if I left it long enough it would eventually lose the capacity to pull up the moisture it needs to remain supple and green and would begin to turn brittle and brown.

A few years ago, early one Sunday morning in December, I was parking my car near a place in our neighborhood where they sell Christmas trees just as the workers were unloading the trees from their truck and setting them up on the sidewalk to sell. As I watched them, I had a visceral feeling of repulsion. I saw Christmas trees in a way I never had before: as living beings whose bodies had been cut in half. Suddenly this yuletide practice seemed brutal and irrational to me, that we should slaughter trees by amputating them from their roots in order to celebrate a spiritual holiday.

And yet, in spite of my ambivalence about it, we have continued to buy a tree each year not only because we love the beauty of a decorated Christmas tree, but because it helps support the tree farmers in our region who would otherwise be selling their land off to developers. In an ironic way, the slaughter of trees helps save the land. Realizing this strange paradox, I feel enormous gratitude for the tree that stands in our living room, and in my heart I thank it for its sacrifice.

I think we are more like trees than we know. We have an outer, visible aspect of ourselves that everyone can see, the aspect that interacts with the external world and is engaged in activities, and, just like we do with our Christmas trees, we usually take great care to attend to its appearance. But there’s also the inward, hidden part of us that is just as essential to our well being but from which too many of us are cut off. It is the aspect of ourselves that taps into mystery, the unseen dimension out of which the outer being arises. Jungians would speak of it in terms of the unconscious that has access to the archetypal energies that fuel our psyches.

Ours is an externally oriented culture, and seems to be more so than ever now that we have technologies that keep us plugged into the external world 24/7. Trying to live constantly attentive to the external world, though, is like trying to live like a tree cut off from its roots. We lose our connection with something vital and life-giving and, over time, we begin to wither and die.

Some cultures are much wiser than ours about staying connected with their roots. In some cultures, for instance, people wouldn’t dream of starting their day before they’d gathered to talk about the dreams that had visited them at night. They understand that it is the unseen realm of mystery that offers them the wisdom they need to live well, and that only by being rooted in and nourished by that dark, unseen realm can the external self thrive.

People in the Western world might be wising up, though, to the fact that having to be at the beck and call of the external world round the clock is simply unsustainable. Last week, the Volkswagon company made a landmark agreement with their workers’ union that the company’s email servers would shut down after the work day so that workers will no longer receive work messages on their BlackBerries when they are off-duty. Hopefully it’s the beginning of a trend.

They say that a tree’s roots underground are as extensive as the trunk and branches that are visible above ground. Can you imagine how much healthier, happier and stable we would be — individually and collectively — if we lived our lives as balanced as trees do in their natural state, tending to growing our roots as much as we do our outer selves?

 

Occupy the New Mind

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Which operating system are you feeding?

Suppose just for a moment that we are all living in a false reality, an illusion that has been generated by a collective misconception, very much like a program that’s running on a holodeck on one of the ships on Star Trek. This false reality is the creation of the human mind out of touch with our true nature as timeless, divine beings. Everything that you witness in the world around you that constricts or annihilates the ongoing creativity and diversity of Life is the mind’s illusion taking on manifested form.

Let’s call this false reality the emperor’s world. The emperor’s world constructs systems that benefit a small minority by dominating, conquering or enslaving others. In the emperor’s world, nature is understood as a commodity to be exploited, and the goal of life is to accumulate power and wealth.

The misconception at the root of this false reality — the operating system, if you will, running beneath the emperor’s world program — is that there exists in this Universe something called “separateness”: “separateness” between people, “separateness” between humans and other species, between humans and the Earth, “separateness” between the physical dimension and the non-physical.Continue Reading

All Structures Are Unstable

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Are we willing to let the structures collapse?

A few years ago I was on spiritual retreat in New Mexico and one day, while sitting, reading, up on a mesa overlooking a valley, I suddenly heard a thunderous roaring sound and I looked up. Across the valley a billowing cloud of dust was rising high up into the air as an enormous landslide cascaded down the side of the mesa across the valley.

I was in awe. This geological formation had stood there for millions of years, and here I was witnessing it as it began to reshape itself.

As if that wasn’t incredible enough, the book I was reading was Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.

And if all of that wasn’t incredible enough, after the dust from the landslide settled and I continued my reading, I turned the page and found that the next section of the book was headed: “All Structures Are Unstable.”Continue Reading

Release All Concept of Enemy

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What would it be like to release all concept of “enemy”?

Several years ago, while on retreat, I was meditating as I walked an outdoor labyrinth. Suddenly, the words came to me: “Release all concept of enemy.”

I was startled. I hadn’t been thinking at all about enemies. In fact, having been on retreat for several days, I hadn’t even had a disagreeable encounter all week.

More surprising than that, though, was what the message was telling me: enemy is nothing more than a concept—just an idea in the mind.

Thanks to that labyrinth revelation, I have become more aware of how often the concept of enemy is invoked. There are the obvious examples, of course—people of other nationalities, ethnicities, religions, socio-economic classes or worldviews are often seen as enemies—and the concept of enemy fuels much of our current politics.

But it doesn’t stop with people. We can see all kinds of things as enemy: the weeds in the garden, the stain on the shirt, the morning commute, the cold virus that’s paying a visit.

People sometimes look to the natural world for evidence that having enemies is, well, natural. Isn’t the lion an enemy to the gazelle, the hawk an enemy to the rabbit? Well, no. They are participating in the food chain that we’re all part of—life sustaining itself on itself. Enemy has nothing to do with the food chain. It’s a category we use to justify malevolent actions towards another.

To release the concept of enemy we first have to notice it. We have to be aware of when we are caught in the concept ourselves, and also notice when it is being used to manipulate us. How many times have you received a phone call from a fundraiser invoking the concept of enemy in order to raise money for a candidate or cause? Can you imagine if we all rejected the whole concept and politely asked them to come up with a different strategy for making their case?

Of course there will be people with whom you disagree. There may even be people whose actions you feel you must oppose. But the only way they become an enemy is if you make them one in your own mind.

One of the most famous sayings of Jesus is, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” By saying this, Jesus was actually negating the concept of enemy. It’s not possible to love someone and at the same time place them in a category called enemy.

Maybe one reason we cling so tenaciously to this concept of enemy is that it enables us to project all the traits we don’t like in ourselves onto other, avoiding the hard work of healing ourselves. But as the Tao te Ching so wisely states:

A great nation is like a great man:

. . .He considers those who point out his faults

as his most benevolent teachers.

He thinks of his enemy

as the shadow that he himself casts.

(translation by Stephen Mitchell)

Who falls in your category of enemy? CEOs? ISIS? Wall Street bankers? Right-to-Lifers? Immigrants? Marines? Fox News Anchors? Democrats? Your neighbor? Your boss? Humanity?

Yourself?

Can you imagine for just a moment how profoundly your life—and the whole world—would instantly change if this concept of enemy simply vanished from our minds?

Imagine That: Reflecting on 9/11

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Imagine what will happen when we tap the most potent resource of all.

If someone had told you on September 10, 2001 that it was possible, using nothing but a handful of box cutters and careful planning, to take thousands of lives, send the world’s largest economy into a tailspin and cause its most technologically advanced military to get mired down in an endless, impoverishing war, would you have believed it?

Doubtful. Most of us probably would have written the person off as a member of the fantasy-based community.

But then we woke up on that sunny September morning shocked to discover that one person’s fantasy can become another person’s reality.

Box cutters. Imagine that.

The attack of September 11th was, first and foremost, an act of imagination. A violent imagination, true, but imagination nonetheless. The great irony was that most of us allowed our own imaginations to be highjacked by our attackers’ narrative. Assuming our assigned role in the script we were handed, we eviscerated our principles of Constitutional law and human rights, launched a military attack, bled off our economic resources to the “War on Terror,” gave the green light to torture, and embraced government surveillance on all of us.  In other words, we began to live as a terrorized people.Continue Reading

Thinker in a Cage

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Do you ever feel trapped in thought?

This summer they were renovating the grounds of the Rodin Museum here in Philadelphia where the largest collection of Rodin sculptures outside Paris reside. One of the casts of Rodin’s renowned statue The Thinker sits in the courtyard entrance to the museum. In order to protect it during the renovations, they enclosed the sculpture in a mesh cage.

It seemed apropos.

Most of us spend our days so caught up in our thoughts that we are oblivious to the world around us. Cut off from the raw experience of life, we spend our days trapped inside the prison of our own minds.Continue Reading