eThoughts : Sacred But Not Exclusive: Part I

Part of the series It’s All Been Said Before™ (© 2006), a division of Book-In-A-Drawer Publications.™

A friend of mine sent me some stuff over the Internet—one was a joke about a priest who got a bit crocked during a sermon and screwed up the biblical language so that it came off as street language and the other, not a joke at all, was about profiling Middle-Eastern folks. My reply follows.

I read and laughed about the priest and the vodka even as I thought about how language can so thoroughly frame our reality. And I read the letter from the American Airlines pilot and thought how true it seemed to me that profiling is what we do everyday, for good or not, and how sometimes we are called upon as a family, a community, a sect, an ethnicity, a gender to speak out about the problems inflicted upon others by members of our group(s). I wonder, however, why we might reference the entirety of groups with offensive language in the name of speaking out. That also frames reality. Perhaps burkas are not about covering up like “a shameful whore” (a quote from the letter) any more than showing cleavage is about the lack of American morals. Perhaps our definition and framing of what constitutes civilized is not the definition of others (referring to a quote from the pilot’s letter: “Do you and you fellow Muslims hate us because we have befriended Israel, the ONLY civilized democratic nation in the entire Middle East?”).

As you noted in the preface to the two forwards, death is not a deterrent. But pain is. And maybe that is why we inflict it so much on so many. We do it in emotional, psychological, and spiritual ways much more often than we do it physically (though there is far too much infliction of physical pain). The former, like soft-tissue injuries, is so much harder to detect and so much harder to fix blame than the latter.

This is in reference to one small part of the pilot’s letter, which I do not take as undermining the entirety of the letter. But I note that human attention can focus on what we consider key words or phrases and forget the truths that proceed or follow that offense (Solomon Asch’s work). Language and communication are a tough road, requiring major doses of attention and forgiveness. But human attention knows all to well how to use the currency of pain and selective memory.

While away, I had a conversation with another about religion. It was their assertion that Christianity and Jesus were the only path to salvation (they were not dogmatic in their assertion, even if they were pretty sure of their position). I wondered aloud how and why this path was so exclusive? If an individual or a group has a sacred experience, whether it is physically orgasmic, clarifying cogent, emotionally uplifting, or spiritually enlightening, how does it come to mean one has entered through the only possible doorway? Is it true, as the psychologist Erik Erikson thought (referencing intimacy), that exclusivity was psychopathological? How did and do humans take what is sacred and make it exclusive? Is it because we need a particular position, even while we inherently have one?

There are many events, feelings, and thoughts that are sacred (perhaps all of them), but that does not necessarily mean they are the exclusive territory of the individual or the group. Perhaps in assembling our position we might consider more questions and insight and fewer assertions (more about accurately describing and questioning how and what our thinking and feelings are as opposed to emphasizing their importance?), though ultimately we cannot avoid taking a position. But in taking a position, we might consider accenting inclusive language (we can love where and how we live, but do we really have to denigrate where and how others live?). This does not mean that life will become less dangerous, it may simply mean that the danger, and the source of that danger, becomes clearer. Like I tell my oldest, law-enforcement daughter: Be nice, affirm, help, but remain vigilant in your affable demeanor, and ready to kill if you’re truly threatened—in so doing, you will not have contributed to any negative outcomes, but you will be less likely to become one of them.

Of course it is not always so simple. We make mistakes in our attention and in our demeanor. And sometimes, whatever our ethnicity, religion, politics, gender, etc., we may have to speak against other positions as well as for our own. But a position is not the same as a person. A position is not the same as a group. If we speak against, let’s be especially careful in our use of language and perhaps we might remember that just because our position is sacred to us, does not mean we’ve earned exclusive status as well.