The first thing is all this noise about the white nationalist movement that has emerged out of the woodwork. I mean it was always there but now they have a president they can trust, so here goes…. These people are truly sick and in some ways dangerous, but what I am focusing on is that some part of their fascist spirit/disease lurks in a lot more hearts than it seems. Their ideas are being portrayed as disgusting and dangerous….and that they are; but I think we are losing sight of the larger picture. In fact I think all this hoopla about them is just another diversion from facing our real history. At the bottom of it all, what they represent and what they bring to the table has in a sense been there from the very beginning of the New World (and of course way before that also). The genocide of the indigenous peoples and then the way we treated those we didn’t kill, and the slave trade and then the way we treated the “freed slaves,” all this points to something very dark at the core of this enterprise. There is a long history here that we are very much in denial of its real meaning. And in fact the current noise is almost a way of saying “we are not THAT bad.” We are told in the mass media that these people are an aberration, an anomaly, a repugnant minority view, etc., and in a sense this is true. Most Americans would not subscribe to a quasi-nazi movement; but then also most Americans don’t know, don’t understand, don’t really care about our REAL history, never mind that “rosy” patriotic fluff they teach in school and which is our pop myth. (Have you ever seen any of those very real photographs of not too long ago, maybe a 100 years or so, a scene in a small southern town, a Sunday afternoon and a whole crowd of people gathered dressed in their Sunday best, men, women, and children, some are smiling, and somewhere in the back you see a black man hanging from a rope…. Yup, those lynchings were real, and those people were just your normal American folk hypnotized by their own myths and illusions and insane fears.) The Confederate icons, disgusting as they are in their meaning, have been prominent in many of our public places–how come no one questioned their appropriateness 50 years ago say. But the most important thing is that even if they vanish overnight, the fact is that they are merely a symptom of the disease at the core of our national heart. They can be torn down, but the disease will not so readily go away.
The next thing is a series of stories that appeared in the Boston Globe which have been pretty much overshadowed by the above stories. You will recall that the Globe was the newspaper that broke open the child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church back about 2001. Their focus was on Boston, but this was a real keen piece of investigative reporting (portrayed in the award-winning movie Spotlight) and it opened the doors to a flood of stories nationally about so many other children who were victims of predator priests. Well, the Globe has done it again; this time not in such a revolutionary way, but still a very significant piece of investigative reporting. This time they focused on adults, women in particular, who have been victims of sexual predation by priests and who have been left behind with children who now don’t know who their real father was. Apparently the number of such cases is in the thousands nationally. The numbers are impossible to nail down, yet there appears to be an incredible number of such victims. The results of this situation are very, very sad. And one big question, and not the only one, that emerges from this story is the reality of that celibacy requirement that the Western Catholic Church puts on its priests. It appears that the number of priests not living up to that requirement is quite large–making Church language about that seem quite unreal. Sexual immaturity and sexual dysfunctionality would not go away if the Church allowed priests to be married, but it could help in many ways in alleviating the problem and diagnosing it before a person gets priestly responsibilities. In the Eastern Church you marry first, then you become a priest. A reasonably healthy married life is a prerequisite to a priestly ministry. Those who want a more focused spiritual life can become monks and nuns. In any case, a lot of issues come up when we considers this situation, a lot of questions, and I am not sure that our Church has ANY answers. Here is the link to that story: (I could not link directly to the Boston Globe, so here are 2 different accounts of that story as it was picked up by the media. You probably can read the original in the Globe in some connections:
Now the last story that I want to consider is not unrelated to the above one. But this time we will be in the Tibetan Buddhist community. In the recent issue of the Buddhist magazine, The Lion’s Roar, there was the very sad story of Sogyal Rinpoche. He is a very renowned Tibetan lama, has a reputation for being a very advanced practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, a friend of the Dalai Lama, and a very key figure in introducing Tibetan Buddhism to Westerners. He is also now caught up in a very serious sex scandal. He appears to have sexually exploited a number of women who were his students, and he also appears to have had a lot of financial misconduct also. Now what’s especially jolting about this is that this person was not an American who joined the Buddhist way and rose in the ranks–we have witnessed this kind of scandal quite a few times in recent decades, and that is sometimes attributed to the spiritual lack of basically a newcomer who advances to a leadership position too soon. Here, however, we have a traditional Tibetan lama, and it is a really sad story. Here is one link to that:
https://www.lionsroar.com/after-allegations-sogyal-rinpoche-retires-from-rigpa/
Sogyal Rinpoche was the leader and key teacher of an international group of Tibetan Buddhism called Rigpa. They have basically booted him out of the position. And there is a lot of self-reflection and commentary going on right now. The problem is not just “American” but one that infects all the major religious traditions. Even traditional Tibetan communities have been affected. And one very important aspect of the problem is the role of the so-called “guru” (or “spiritual father” in the Christian tradition). It is good and important that there are people who can be spiritual teachers, but it is a really bad thing to idealize these people, to “put them on a pedestal,” to in fact treat them as “beyond criticism” or even “godlike.” I have on several occasions written about this problem in these postings, and I am glad to see that there are various followers of these great Asian traditions coming to terms with the real problems inherent in that “guru mechanism.” What’s important to recognize is that the construct of the “specialness” of the spiritual teacher is a cultural construction and not an inherent or intrinsic element at the heart of that religion; and that goes whether it be Tibet, India, China or Japan or anywhere else (including anywhere within Christianity).
The Tibetan lama, the Zen Master, the Indian guru, the Christian spiritual father, all take on this authority that seems beyond questioning. And I emphasize again, this is all a cultural construct which is only apparently connected to the mysticism of that religious tradition. It is like all those insane “honor codes” which are so repressive to women in various Middle Eastern and Indian contexts, whether they be Muslim, Christian or Hindu–these are all cultural constructs which then are imbued with religious significance and treated as such. One also thinks of a place like Ireland about a century ago when all priests and bishops were treated as super special people who were totally beyond all criticism. This kind of stuff is simply a cultural sickness, and it leads to a bad end.
Getting back to this case, it is good to see the Dalai Lama came out with a powerful statement calling on all Buddhists not to be afraid to report any misconduct by their teachers…bring it out into the open. It is not healthy, spiritually, psychologically or physically to ignore or pretend that these things do not happen and that “our teacher” is “perfect.” Here is a link to that statement:
https://www.lionsroar.com/dalai-lama-denounce-ethical-misconduct-by-buddhist-teachers/
And there were several other articles by various Buddhist practitioners about this problem, pointing out what I was saying above, our tendency to “glorify” our spiritual teachers, sometimes at great cost to our well-being. Here is another link:
https://www.lionsroar.com/teachers-not-gods/
At the end of it all, I always come back to my friends, the Desert Fathers…..I never cease to be amazed how prescient and incisive they really were.