More on soccer fans acting like dumb monkeys.
Category: Zombies
Spanish Simians
My RSS feed to BBC World news today has two stories which mention England, Spain, racism, football (soccer), monkeys, apes, and paleontology.
Reality-Based Community
I began to see bloggers identifying themselves as part of the Reality-Based Community in the last couple of days. It’s an ironic response to a remark by a White House staff member who dismissed the the Reality-based community when he was talking to a journalist in 2002. Most of the proud members of the Reality-Based community are using it as evidence that the Bush team is wrapped up in its own rhetoric – its own separate reality, if you please. Some are using it as evidence that the Bush team is being run by religious zealots who reject science and reason.
I think this remark tells us that the people in the White House like being positive and pro-active and optimistic and supportive and team players, and that they have their own private code for talking about people on the outside.
Moralizing Liberals
A few days after 2004 American elections, I am tired of the commentary coming from the propaganists and leaders of both of the dominant factions. Republicans, barely restraining their glee at winning, talk insincerely about reaching out to liberals and healing. Liberals talk about how illiterate and stupid fundamentalists were tricked by propaganda, funded by corporate interests, into electing a hollow and stupid person to the most powerful position in the world. Some liberal leaders and propagandists are trying to distance themselves and the Democrats from the Sorry Everybody (Sorry, slow link) project and other distasteful expressions of the disappointment of Senator Kerry’s supporters, although they share the sentiment.
Some leading American liberals have been saying that the Democrats failed in the federal campaigns because the Republicans appealed to “moralism”. This discourse has a couple of variations. There is a pragmatic assessment of the factors that swayed voters, and there is a more theoretical attempt to explain that Republican voters are attracted to moralism, because they are influenced by the views prevalent in their communities – meaning rural and suburban communities, and faith communities. Some liberals imply that it was unfair for the Republicans to appeal to those values and that is wrong for voters to decide political questions on religious and moral grounds. Some liberals are concerned that their attacks on the religious right are reinforcing the claim of the religious right that the Republicans have received a clear mandate for a socially conservative agenda.
It is confused, messy discourse. There is confusion between electoral strategy and the principles – if we can talk about firm principles – of political ideology. Liberal ideologists would like to see the Democratic party, as the instrument of their ideology, succeed without becoming too conservative. They are involved in a project of making liberalism more appealing to the voters, without giving up on the principles they espouse. They are also engaged in the great liberal sport of trying to understand why the masses don’t embrace liberal values and liberal politicians, which usually leads to criticism of the masses, and criticism of the role or religion and religious leaders in forming public opinion.
I heard Robert B. Reich (liberal Democrat, economist, lawyer and writer, politician – Secretary of Labour in President Clinton’s first cabinet) answering a call from one of the hosts of the CBC Radio One program “As it Happens” within a couple of days after the election. His main points were much the same as those posted in the online version of The American Prospect. His online article (published November 4, 2004) The Moral Agenda contends that President Bush and the Republicans campaigned with more moral conviction, which made Mr. Bush a more convincing candidate. He argues that the Democratic party should be committed to liberal values and passionate about those values. He is resigned to the fact that the Democrats won’t find their majority by appealing to the religious right, and I suspect that Professor Reich would be appalled at having to engage with them. The institutional Christian churches in America, including the unaffliated and independentl churches, are socially conservative. Liberal radical Christians devoted to the social justice message in the Bible are an embattled minority. The liberal cause will not get the support of the majority of chuched-up Americans in the foreseeable future. The churches are a relatively cohesive and organized demographic entity. Their members influence and reinforce their own community values. The Democrats can’t connect to those communities. I don’t foresee the organization of liberal churches – that’s an oxymoron in modern America – or any similiarly committed and coherent communities on the liberal side. It isn’t that hard to find good theological reasons for Christians to support liberal policies on social justice issues, but those arguments simply don’t have any traction with social conservatives. Social conservatives join their churches to be respectable and maintain their status. The expect and demand to to hear a message that supports their life choices. If they aren’t comfortable, they move to a church that respects their values. Their pastors aren’t dumb, and their churches have evolved into the institutional churches of the American right.
Professor Reich is a committed philosophical liberal wants to move to the left instead of to the center. After leaving Clinton’s Cabinet, criticized Clinton and “Third Way” politics (see also Margaret Weir’s paper “The Collapse of Bill Clinton’s Third Way” – warning this link goes to a .pdf document). He has said harsh things about the Republican party’s relationship to the social conservative movement – a movement dominated by Christian fundamentalists (which now includes both Protestant evangelicals and ultramontane Catholics). In articles like “The Religious Wars” (December 2003) and “Forget the Sweet Talk” he argued that the Republican leadership has been promoting division on social and moral issues and effectively driving the culture wars to divert attention from their economic agenda, their collective personal corruption and their intellectual failures.
The Republican focus on those issues was good politics, but it was not a phony issue. There was a fundamental difference in the way the major political parties addressed the politics of personal freedom and personal identity. The Republican message was that Americans are free to enjoy the good life, and free to support their churches, but should also be engaged in supporting their country and in promoting the good of the community. Their message was principled, ethical, communitarian, charitable, with a sense of duty to the nation and a sense of mission. It was patriotic. It was noble. Reich was right to point out that those general messages are packaged with an agenda that is free market, libertarian, devoid of any sense of conscience or social responsibility. The Republicans talk a strong game on morality, but their policies tend to release the wealthy and the powerful from moral and legal obligations. They managed to hide the business interests that they serve behind the cloak of religion and patriotism.
The Republicans seem to have been the better communicators and propagandists this time around. It is tempting for liberals to avoid self-critical reflection on their ideology and policy by arguing about propaganda and electoral tactics, or by complaining about the power of the churches.
Politics is a complex system and that rational debate on values is open-ended. I respect his commitment and his willingness to keep talking, keep debating, keep fighting. I am pleased that Professor Reich, unlike other liberals, is not openly criticizing the voters for their values. I think he is right when he says the Democrats need a better moral picture. On the other hand – and he doesn’t seem to get it – the liberal politics he promotes are electorally handicapped. Americans, whether or not they are religious, like to feel that they are right. They like the idea that they are good people living in a great country. They instinctively like the idea that truth, justice and democracy are objective, real, and living in America.
Liberals almost admit to being incapable of making firm moral choices – everyone if free to do what they want and no one should judge anyone else’s choices. Liberals talk the politics of non-judgmental, value-free inclusion, which means balancing the demands of many groupsfor public resources and public recognition. Liberal balancing becomes a dance among interest groups. Liberal tolerance becomes a flirtation with cults, fads and kooks. Liberal Democrats come across as silly, self-absorbed, condescending and narcissistic. It is simply propaganda – liberal Democrats say yes to every request – the have promiscious in their relationships with identity and issue interests.
Liberal ideologists have become too absorbed in their own rhetoric. It has been difficult for them to talk passionately about a firm and clear vision of social justice, as the successful Democrats did in earlier eras. Reich is right – the modern Democrats are not very passionate, or at least not very convincing at looking passionate. His idea that liberals should be more passionate about their liberal values is intriguing, but I can’t figure out which, among many sets of values respected by Democrats, he wants to promote.
Fletcher Christian’s Descendents
The rape trial of a large portion of the adult male population of the Pitcairn Islands has finished with guilty verdicts against 6 of 7 defendants on some charges.
There were serious legal issues in the case, which have attracted learned commentary in the inaugural issue of the New Zealand Journal of Public and International Law (2003)1 NZJPIL 229 (this links to PDF version of the article) and general media commentary. One of the issues was whether British laws of statutory rape (sex with a girl under a certain age is automaticly rape because the girl is deemed to be unable to make a valid decision to have consensual sex) applied and were known to be in force. As the trials progressed and as the case was reported in the media, the issue in the cases seemed to be more basic – did these men coerce young girls, did the girls report it, and why nobody else in the community seemed to care what was going on. There is also a lingering question of whether the cascade of allegations was simply uncovered by the investigation, or whether some allegations were collusive, imitative or vindictive. The sensational allegations made in some child sex abuse cases in Canada have turned out to have been largely the product of imaginative kids and zealous investigators. The Courts will continue to sort that out.
Noble History
The idea of the noble savage has run through philosophy, anthropology and literature for several hundred years and it seems to colour ideas about Aboriginal history. Many books and movies tend to show the life of North American Aboriginals in historical times, living with dignity, close to nature. There is an idea that aboriginal peopled have been dispossessed of their land and deprived of the right to keep on living as noble savages. In than context, the idea of the noble savage is a metaphor for the status of Aboriginal people in the modern world, where Aboriginals face discrimination and live with social and economic disadvantages.
Colleen Simard, an aboriginal woman and a writer, has a weekly column in the Winnipeg Free Press. On Tuesday October 12, 2004 her column was a reaction to Amnesty International’s document on violence against Aboriginal Women, Stolen Sisters. The column begins:
“if I had been born a few hundred years ago, my place in society would have been certain. The role of aboriginal women was revered; we were the head of the family, the life-givers, the back-bone of our nation. But things have changed.”
Most of her column was a painful story about seeing the abuse of other women in her family, the effects of discrimination on her own self-esteem, and her own experience as a battered woman in a four-year relationship. As such it was a good, honest piece of writing.
She cited Amnesty International as saying that aboriginal women are the targets of violence, receive inadequate treatment by police and are five times more likely to die “brutally”. What Amnesty said was:
“According to a 1996 Canadian government statistic, Indigenous women between the ages of 25 and 44 with status under the federal Indian Act, are five times more likely than other women of the same age to die as the result of violence. Indigenous women’s organizations have long spoken out against violence against women and children within Indigenous communities – concerns that have still not received the attention they deserve. More recently, a number of advocacy organizations, including the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), have drawn attention to acts of violence perpetuated against Indigenous women in predominantly non-Indigenous communities”.
Stolen Sisters goes on to refer to news stories about unsolved crimes by white men against aboriginal women and violence against aboriginal sex trade workers, perhaps taking advantage of the media’s fascination with the allegations of serial killings in Vancouver, Edmonton, Regina and other Western cities and the gruesome detail of the bodies of victims being fed to hogs in one case. Douglas Cuthand, an aboriginal writer in Saskatoon had a column, also devoted to Stolen Sisters, published in the Free Press later the same week. He noted that Amnesty seemed to be occupied with crimes against sex trade workers, while the fact is that most of the violence against Aboriginal women is committed by aboriginal men within the family and aboriginal society. He was right. The Stolen Sisters paper did not discuss violence against aboriginal women within their domestic relationships, although the full version of the paper cited other material that addressed the subject.
Colleen Simard’s argued that violence against women is contrary to the values of modern authentic Aboriginal spirituality, and I would hope that she is right about that. She also seems to make a factual claim about the history of Aboriginal peoples and what life was like for women in real historical Aboriginal communities. She may be implying that violence against women, like alcohol and smallpox, was introduced to America by Europeans. I think she was carrying a metaphorical spiritual or moral vision too far when she suggested that women had more status and power, or were safer in the old days.
I would assume that Aboriginal spirituality, in some or many First Nations, was positive about the life-giving role of women. In fact many religions and spiritual systems have been positive, in one way or another, about the life-giving role of women, without addressing equality issues in modern terms. Traditional Aboriginal spirituality may have said all kinds of things about the importance of women without according women real status or power in traditional society. We see how modern spiritualities and religions deal with the issue. The present Pope wants to revive the cult of Marian devotions within Catholicism and says nice things about the role of women, but he will not give them power and influence in the Church. Mohammed is supposed to have had good relationsips with the women in his life and the Koran and other writings can be read to imply modern ideas of equality and liberation, but fundamentalist Islam brings the veil and the burka.
Typically, a really fundamentalist movement that gets back to old-time values will not place a high value on women’s equality and it will probably tolerate physical discipline and other forms of force that are unacceptable within a modern society. Real historical examples on this particular topic are not useful in advancing claims for the status of women, because real historical societies had a particular place for women and some tolerance for the use of physical force against women and children. It’s hard to find real evidence that women were safe from domestic violence in historical aboriginal societies, and it’s pretty unlikely that they were. People struggle over resources. People struggle for power in personal relationships and families. Anger and resentment are always there. We aren’t as nice as we think we are. Women want things and they fight too.
It’s wrong to talk about all the diverse Aboriginal societies as if they were the same. Without making any judgments about how “advanced” those societies were, they had their share of conflicts and violence. Some did better than others.. The historical record is that physical contact has been a part of conflict resolution in all societies . In most societies some physical contact was and is tolerated by custom and law, and in all societies there have been and are boundaries.
Ms. Simard has plugged modern ideas about women’s equality into a romantic, idyllic and imaginary historical context. We can pick scenes in literature and movies showing aboriginal women as having had an idyllic life. A lot of otherwise serious and scholarly women fantasize about prehistoric European societies in which women ruled in the name of the Goddess. People have the ability to imagine a good or ideal situation, and the idea of a lost Eden, a lost Paradise is a powerful metaphor for the sense of restlessness and discontent we experience in our lives, and for striving towards an ideal.
Ms. Simard’s personal story illustrates the possibility of leaving an unsafe situation. A positive spirituality and morality is important. The National Aboriginal Circle Against Family Violence has a poem on the index page at their web site proclaiming positive values within an Aboriginal context. It’s useful to question the superiority of European culture at the time of first contact. It’s useful to celebrate and promote Aboriginal spirituality and Aboriginal cultures. It is good to look to history to identify the traditions that will sustain a distinctive Aboriginal identity against the forces of globalization. It’s not that useful to talk about an imaginary past in which there was no domestic violence against aboriginal women.
I reviewed the Stolen Sisters document, which is a kind of a position paper combined with a fund-raising campaign. Amnesty International calls it a report and a study, but that’s a questionable description. Their paper summarizes news stories and recycles material from the Manitoba Aboriginal Justice Inquiry and Federal Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP). The RCAP report addressed family violence in Aboriginal families very specifically. Among other things, the RCAP report addressed family violence social conditions of Aboriginals as a dispossessed and disenfranchised people as one of reasons for the prevalence of violence against Aboriginal women by Aboriginal men.
Amnesty’s voice reinforces what aboriginal groups have been saying for themselves, and it should renew interest in the recommendations of the Manitoba AJI and the RCAP. At the same time they seem to be taking advantage of the issue of violence against aboriginal women to publicize their organization.
Save the Mosquito
People who get mad about using chemicals to kill mosquitos.
Winnipeg has built itself at the junctions of the Assiniboine, the Seine, the LaSalle Rivers and other tributary streams and creeks with the Red River of the North. It sits at the bottom of prehistoric Lake Agassiz, at the low point of a flood plain. This contributes to the fertility of the soil, and to the presence of hundreds of thousands of sloughs, dips, melt ponds and other bodies of standing water which nurture the reproductive capability of the mosquito.
When the warm breezes of summer warm the breeding ponds of insect world, Winnipeg resorts to spraying the insecticide Malathion. When the spray trucks roll, the Greens start to write letters to the editor, to caucus, and ultimately to blockade. Last year it was a few streets. This year, it was the City yards where the trucks are loaded. Last year it was impromtu drama. This year it was civil disobedience and organized protest, resolved by arrests and criminal charges.
Remembering Sister Jane
Sister Jane’s drop-in Center, Chez Nous, operated in an old bank building at the corner of Main Street and Higgins Avenue. When Jane was sick, the Center was frequently closed. When Jane died, her friends and supporters on the Board of directors of the non-profit corporation were left with a decision to sell the building, or to try to carry on Sister Jane’s work.
They have carried on. Jane’s therapist and friend Vicki Frankel helped the Board to reorganize itself. The Board members trained themselves to work in the drop-in Center, and they found and trained more volunteers. They raised money, and they kept the doors open. The Archdiocese of Winnipeg has been recognizing their work, and Sister Jane’s work in taking collections and publicizing the work of Chez Nous in its internal newsletter in May 2004.
On Sunday May 16, 2004, Chez Nous held an open house to unveil a plaque in memory of Sister Jane. I arrived late and missed the unveiling. The Archbishop of Winnipeg was there, which meant a lot to Jane’s Catholic friends who saw it as supportive of Jane and her calling to work with the poor. I spoke with some of Jane’s friends about how they were handling work with addicts and street people, and how they managed their safety and emotional boundaries with needy and sometimes dangerous people. I looked at the comfortable old furniture, the posters, the pictures of visitors and volunteers. Again, I was moved to realize that while Chez Nous offers little in the way of financial support, it tries to provide a safe respite from the street, with respect and love. I realized again that Sister Jane, from her own pain and confusion, had been true to her calling and true to the Gospel message of loving the poor.
I wasn’t able to stay long because I found myself breaking down into tears. I don’t think it was honest grief for Sister Jane, although I believe that her life and death were painful and sad. It was a more personal grief, of a self-pitying kind.
Jane’s case also marked some turning points in my life. When I met Jane in late 2001 I was a few months past a series of surgical procedures and a diagnosis – incorrect as it happened – of colo-rectal cancer. I had started to go to Church again, after years of skepticism and anger at the Church. I was rejoicing in not having cancer, and in having had an explanation and an end to years of GI tract problems. However, my son was growing away from the family, and my wife was becoming desperately sad about n. and angrily disappointed that I was more skeptical than ever about her favoured spirituality – the New Age. As I worked on Jane’s case, I read about questionable Alternative therapies and human growth movements. Some books and articles directly indicted my wife’s parents, friends and counsellors. For instance Singer and Lalich’s book “Crazy Therapies” had a chapter on Neuro-Linguistic Therapy which was one of my mother-in-law’s strong interests. My wife and her parents did not like my research into cults and quack therapies. My wife became convinced that my negative and skeptical attitude to life was the main cause for our son’s estrangement and rebellion and our daughter’s emotional problems during her childhood and mid-teen years. Eventually she said that I was hurting her by criticizing the New Age, and demanded a divorce.
Visiting Chez Nous this past Sunday brought that sharply and painfully into focus. I don’t blame my decision to take Jane’s case for the changes in my own life. I think working with and for Jane has helped me, then and now, to understand what I believe in, and to accept that life comes with pain and loss.
Starting Over
Starting Over is a self-help book by Thomas A. Whiteman and Randy Peterson, published by Pinon Press in 2001. I found it at McNally Robinson, a Western Canadian chain of bookstores.
Whiteman is real licenced psychologist with a Ph. D. degree from Bryn Mawr, a real university. I don’t take that for granted in the authors of self-help books. He is an entrepreneur, with a counselling practice in Pennsylvania, called Life Counseling Services and a connection to Fresh Start seminars. The book is founded in the working experience of a qualified professional. The appearance is that Whiteman has the experience and the ideas, and collaborated with Peterson to produce a book so I will generally refer to Whiteman as the author.
Since the public, the publishing industry and the counselling professions have been influenced by “recovery”, humanistic, transpersonal and transformational psychology, even qualified professionals often spout pop psychology nonsense in self-help books. While Starting Over is not entirely free of pop psych jargon, it seems to be well grounded in common sense. There is some God-talk in the book and I wondered if this was intended to be useful to evangelical Christians who might have religious problems with the divorce process. I confirmed that later when I Googled Thomas Whiteman and Fresh Start Seminars. Whiteman seems to have developed a Christian-oriented version of his principles through his work with Fresh Start, which is noted at the Fresh Start Web site and other sites like JCSM. In “Starting Over,” he presents his advice in a less religiously oriented manner. His ideas are not particularly religious or faith-based but he makes the effort to help an evangelical Christian accept divorce and accept the idea of remarriage.
Starting Over is for people who did not expect or initiate the end of a relationship. It starts with survival, and tries to get to starting over. It emphasizes taking responsibility for one’s recovery, accepting that recovery is going to be a long, painful process, and that healing requires forgiveness and justice.
Chapter One addresses taking responsibility, which requires consciously recognizing that the marriage is over and taking deliberate steps towards starting over. Divorce isn’t an agreement. If one partner wants to leave, it happens. The writers encourage people to believe that there is a natural healing process which will happen if we take responsibility for working to start over.
They use the theory or image of Five Stages of Grieving in Chapter Two, and through the next few chapters. As I posted last week, the Five Stage theory is only a rough model of the process of grieving for death and dying. I doubt that there is scientific evidence that divorcing people – either the ones who leave or the ones left behind – go through all five steps in any order. Whiteman basically takes the idea of Five Stages and redefines the Stages in terms of divorce. He says that people will slip quickly through the first three stages of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, and Depression and then often slip back and forth between stages before they finally feel better and reach Acceptance. He also says there is a vital extra step.
He defines Denial as a response to emotional shock, in which a person will deny the reality of the situation and will, as a result, be unable to be open to change and to entering into new relationships. He suggests that denial may often last only a few days, although in some cases it last for months or a lifetime. He explains that Anger is natural and legitimate. He suggests expressing anger in legitimate ways, and in framing the issues and identifying anger as a response to perceived mistreatment. He says that it is important to re-examine our perceptions of the breakup as a way of reducing and resolving the anger. He advises avoiding confrontation that will escalate the anger, redirecting energy spent in anger to more constructive projects, and resolving the anger by altering perceptions of the original injustice.
His discussion of Bargaining is brief and to the point. Bargaining with oneself or the ex in the hope of reconciliation is tempting and risky. Usually the other spouse is not open to it, and often the other spouse has an agenda and will manipulate you. You may sell yourself out by being weak in the hope of leaving the door open to reconciliation. You may also bend yourself out of shape by trying to change yourself to please a spouse who will be unhappy with life, no matter what you do. His advice for Depression is to expect it, tolerate it, avoid addictive behaviour, and to get help if it lasts too long or becomes too intense. He explains Acceptance as the end state where you have stopped obsessing about it, and move on with your life. I think he has perhaps taken that Stage out of order, to try to conform to the popular model. He introduces an important sixth step in Chapter Two which he discusses at length in Chapter Five. He advises that we need to aim for forgiveness. More on that later.
Chapters Three and Four state that recovering from the emotional pain of marriage breakdown can take, usually, two years or longer. Progress through the stages is a climb up a slippery slope. Anger and depression will recur. I think he also says that even after passing through the stages, you may need more time and some work on a healthy self view and healthy connections before you should start a new intimate relationship. Whiteman counsels avoiding intimate relationships for a couple of years after a breakup because you will be too fragile and needy and your judgment will be impaired – you will be either too vulnerable or too defensive to succeed. He counsels avoiding rebound relationships. People enter into rebound relationships to prove that they are lovable – to themselves, to the ex who left them. Often a rebound relationship is with a person with the same character as the ex, and has the same weaknesses as the original relationship. Sometimes the rebound relationship is with a person who exploits your vulnerability and need.
Chapter Five discusses forgiveness. Whiteman explains that he does not counsel forgetting the other party’s actions or excusing the other party’s misconduct. Forgiveness is not earned or deserved. Forgiveness is an authentic release of animosity. Whiteman is very careful to explain that forgiveness is not a matter of taking the moral high ground and saying that you have forgiven the other person. He advises that you have to see the person with new eyes, to assess the person realistically and to stop being angry. He suggests that the process will vary, depending on whether the other person wants forgiveness, and whether there is going to be any kind of ongoing relationship. These are not simple terms and concepts. The idea that the other person will want forgiveness means that the other person must be willing to meet and hear your grievances and acknowledge that he or she has harmed you. An ongoing relationship doesn’t mean a reconciliation. It may refer to custody and access arrangements with the kids, working in the same company or profession, going to the same Church, belonging to the same clubs and organizations, or just being in the same circle of friends.
He suggests that it is appropriate, where the other person is open, to discuss each person’s the grievances in neutral language, and resolve the animosity – even if there no ongoing relationship. If there is going to be a relationship, but the other person acts as if you as if you are entirely in the wrong, it is still possible to state your views, be heard and move on. His view of the importance of forgiveness may reflect an underlying theological approach to psychology, but his view is also logical and supported within conventional scientific models of pyschology.
Chapter Six is about Self View. He puts forward some of the standard ideas about developing a positive outlook and taking care of oneself. He refers at one point to the slippery concept of self-talk, and he lapses into some jargon in this Chapter. Mainly, he puts himself at a distance from the popular ideas of entitlement and self-esteem. He advises that we should develop a balanced view of ourselves as valuable people in a community of valuable people. We shouldn’t feel deprived or denied if we have not enjoyed great achievements, and we shouldn’t demand praise or flattery for slight achievements. We should take care of ourselves and respect others. We should examine ourselves and let go of emotional baggage that contributes to an incorrect or unfair self-appraisal. As with all advice in self-help books, the advice in this Chapter can be taken selectively, but Whiteman does his best to be clear and helpful.
I can deal with the rest of the book quickly. Chapter Seven encourages participation in wider communities and discourages isolation. It warns that we need to look at the explicit and implicit message we get from our friends and to discount the messages that support an unhealthy self view or unhealthy behaviour. Chapter Eight encourages supporting and helping others.
Meeting Sister Jane
A little over two years ago, in the early months of 2002, I started a court proceeding for a woman who ran a drop-in center at Higgins and Main, in the very deepest, poorest, most alcohol and drug addled part of Winnipeg’s inner City core. (I am, by the way, a lawyer by day). Sister Jane was, at that time, 50 and had been a Catholic nun since she 20. She was living alone, without the support of her religious congregation, and she had terminal cancer.
She had been raised in New Hampshire and joined her congregation as a young woman just at the time that memberships in the Catholic Religious Orders was plummeting. Soon after she joined her Order, she accepted an invitation from a Canadian nun, a self-styled visionary reformer, to move to Edmonton and then to Winnipeg to be part of an innovative spiritual commune.
It didn’t work for Sister Jane. The project tried to fuse transformational psychology with Catholic spirituality. It became the leader’s personal project, and became whatever the leader wanted it to be. Jane found that her leader was controlling and grandiose. Jane swore in Affidavits that the leader introduced a purported therapy in which she initiated naked hugs which progressed to other sexual acts. Jane submitted sometimes but started to resist and react, which angered her leader, who disciplined her within the close confines of their communal life, and expelled her from the commune. She was then marginalized in her own Order because of her alienation from the leader and the rest of her Sisters who were connected to commune and the project.
Sister Jane had remained a member of her Order, but had started to live on her own. She received a little support to find a building and start a drop-in place but she had to recruit a board and to find funds for operating expenses and her own needs from a very early stage. She made friends, and her friends supported her and her ministry.
When she found that she had cancer, she sought some support from her superiors in the Order. In that process she described her personal experiences in the new movement, and she found that she was getting very little support. The Archbishop of Winnipeg listened to her and helped her personally with some other needs, but he did not intervene in the affairs of Jane’s autonomous Religious Order.
When I met Jane, her cancer was in remission and she was trying to understand if she could continue in that Religious Order, or if she had to leave. We started Court proceedings to recover compensation for the harm caused by illegal acts, her cancer came back in the winter of 2002-2003 and she died last summer. Her ministry was curtailed by her illness, and it closed for a while after she died. Her friends have been trying to revive it.
I visited her last spring, before her last hospitalization. Her ministry was based in an old three story bank building. The drop in was on the main floor and she lived in a suite on the upper floors. It was a small apartment, with a little chapel or prayer room. It was small oasis for her in a tough area of town and Jane lived with anxiety and fear.
When I had been discussing her evidence with her, I had tried to understand what she did at a drop-in. Did she provide a social service? Counselling? Teaching? Referrals to other agencies? Some kind of therapy? She explained it as living out the Church’s preferential option for the poor. I recognized that as an articulation of liberation theology, but I don’t think I started to understand it until later. What she did was to be present for people and to listen to them, providing them with a safety and respect. The theologian Rowan Williams, in his book Christ on Trial, How the Gospel Unsettled our Judgment
wrote:
God’s transcendence is in some sense present in and with those who do not have a voice, in and with those without power to affect their world, in and with those believed to have lost any right they might have had in the world. God is not with them because they are naturally virtuous, or because they are martyrs; he is simply there in the fact that they are ‘left over’ when the social and moral score is added up by the managers of social and moral behaviour.
What strikes me about Sister Jane’s work is that she was able to carry on while she herself was deeply wounded. I think I have only been able understand the value of her ministry as I have begun to experience my own pain and powerlessness over the events and the people in my life, and when I have needed to have people listen to me.
Last week a common friend of Jane’s and mine told me that Sister Jane had seen that I was going through some changes – as I certainly have been. I was simply moved to tears that she had the compassion to see me clearly while I thought I was helping her.