Cur alii, non alii? Thoughts outside theology

 Medieval Christian theology used this phrase, as modern theologians know — "why some, not others" for the so-called "mystery of salvation."

So, why do some people go to hell despite the "loving arms" of a dual-omni, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, deity? Catholics noted god's acting first in grace, but cite "prevenient grace," that is, god foreseeing receptivity in some humans. Orthodox are broadly similar. The Protestant Reformers rejected that. Calvin ultimately took the logical road of double predestination, later rejected by Jacob Arminius in the Netherlands, whose teachings seeped into Methodism, and basically, most modern American evangelical Protestantism, which tries to avoid the issue of "election" by god or not in general. Luther went with the illogical single predestination, not wanting to blame god for sending some people to hell, but refused to accept the truth that not to choose is itself a choice.

(If you're a believer in Eastern religions, re getting through karma, it's no mystery at all; you simply didn't do enough. If you're an Orthodox Jew, it's basically a mix of not doing enough and not professing the Shema and understanding Yahweh correctly. If you're a traditional Muslim? Oops; kismet is just kicking the ball down the road like Christian doctrine.)

"Cur alii, non alii" can be applied to things both serious and frivolous outside of Christian election and salvation. 

For example, why does some of the white working class allegedly (I said ALLEGEDLY) vote its interest by voting Democrat (ALLEGEDLY supporting workers, but more and more, nationally helmed by neoliberals who ignore things like unionization when not actively helping oppose union drives) rather than voting Republican, as many now do? (Actually, with the second ALLEGEDLY parenthesis, this one isn't a total mystery.)

For me, there's something else.

"Cur alii, non alii" on addiction and sobriety.

Why do some people who have long-term addiction problems, whether to illicit drugs, scrips, or alcohol (I'm setting nicotine aside due to the power of its physical/chemical addiction), who know, and admit to others, that they have such problems, who know that moderation of their chemical use isn't working for them, who have had social or even legal problems due to this, and who are seeking help from sobriety programs and/or counselors, "not get it"?

Why don't they stay sober after a certain amount of time, especially if they get past the first weeks and physical cravings are gone? (Most drugs both licit and illicit do not have that high of a physical addiction threshold. Psychological addiction is another story.)

Have they not totally self-elected, that is, have they, whether consciously or subconsciously (and I believe it's a choice even when subconscious) not "locked in" this decision?

Yes, there are "reasons" that sobriety gets challenged. But? Some people stay sober even through these challenges, including sheer boredom. Others do not.

In the world of addiction, some people have extra challenges, such as mental health issues such as depression or bipolar disorder; others have backgrounds of abusive childhoods. Yet, within the same backgrounds, some people attain, achieve and hold onto sobriety, and others do not. Cur alii, non alii? 

Back to the political world. Hardcore conservatives can, reportedly, learn new thinking tricks. Just get them to stop watching Fox for a month. That said, does the effect stick? Both the effect of being better critical thinkers, and what caused it — not watching Fox. There are plenty of "90 day wonders" in the sobriety world, after all. And, on the Fox watchers, people were paid to watch CNN, which means it's nowhere near a double-blinded study, and therefore, of little value. Whether paid or not for saying they were better at critical thinking, the participants who watched CNN might have said that for the researchers' benefit. Cur alii, non alii?

At some point, per any great matter of human psychology, per Yeshua bar Yusuf, one has to preach to the lost, and "catechize" them afterward. Those who still leave themselves an out, an escape hatch, know where to return to.

THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION

The following poem, as should be clear from the title, riffs on a famous quotation from Yahweh in the Old Testament/Tanakh. It also references a fairly famous saying of Jesus, one of Tolstoy and one of Wordsworth, concluding with Herbert Spencer.

THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION

There is no sin,

As we have no gods to offend,

But offenses there are,

One human to another, in great regularity.

The offensiveness of familiarity

Nests above all in families dysfunctional,

Each alike in their own different way.

No gods need destroy, nor drive mad,

Those who burden themselves

And their descendants,

Unto the third and fourth generations,

With false guilt, shame, anxiety and worse.

Rather than the elders

Being weighted with millstones

And cast into the sea,

The thrust off these crushing weights

Onto the necks of the weaker and younger

Of their own households and families.

Social Darwinism starts at home.

            — Feb. 14, 2015

Poem: Too soon to tell

TOO SOON TO TELL

A new job.

New bosses. New responsibilities.

Not-so-new computers.

Anger. Antsiness. Impatience. Control issues.

Was this the right decision?

Did I choose wisely in coming here?

Per Zhou Enlai,

When he was asked about the success

Of the French Revolution:

“It’s too soon to tell.”

It’s too soon to tell.

My mind will be a jumble

And even a bit shell-shocked

For more than a month.

Will weekend visits to Austin help?

To the degree they do,will they be worth the price?

It’s too soon to tell.

Was it just fear of change?

Or was my intuition correctly ringing out

A blaze of three alarms or more?

Should I have suffered

Through yet more feelings of being trapped,

Through low-grade ongoing anxieties,

Rather than the potential of high-voltage unknowns?

It’s too soon to tell.

When I left Dallas for Odessa,

The first domino of moving to fall in this chain,

After two months of unemployment,

Anxious over job hunting,

And recognizing the severity of the recession,

Yet loath to move

And depressed as I drove across the Permian,

Was it good or bad?

It’s too soon to tell.

Good and bad are relative, and utilitarian;

I did nothing “wrong” any of these times.

But I made decisions

In uncertainty, without knowing even

Rough percentages on outcomes.

And, so, in that utilitarian sense,

As to whether these choices were good or bad?

It’s too soon to tell.

December 26, 1963 – was it good or bad?

It’s too soon to tell.

            Jan. 3, 2012

THE GREATEST IS HOPE

St. Paul was wrong,
Especially if we remove religious and metaphysical overtones
From “faith, hope and love.”
Love cannot abide without hope,
Whether the hope that a lover, or an adult child,
Will change bad behaviors.
Or the hope that a parent will accept an adult child
With different values and beliefs.
Without such hope, love cannot abide.
And faith, not metaphysical faith in things unseen,
But, faith in the sense of trust?
Faith cannot abide, either,
Without hope that a person, or a place,
Will improve, even if we don’t yet know how.
Even faith in our own selves cannot abide,
Without hope that we have some degree of control,
If but in a small corner,
Over our own lives and selves.
The greatest, and most basic, of these
Is hope.

Just how irrational are we? Very?

Very, or potentially very irrational, defining "irrational" and "rational" in terms of the great project of Descartes and followers, it seems.

In a blog post at Discover, in follow-up to his column last week at Mother Jones, Chris Mooney notes that the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences has devoted an entire issue to what he covered at Mojo, with links to summaries of key content.

Here's a couple of key outtakes:

First:

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions.

And more, from a response to some of the issues:

When people reason alone, there will often be nothing to hold their confirmation bias in check. This might lead to distortions of their beliefs. As mentioned above, this is very much the case. When people reason alone, they are prone to all sorts of biases.

In short, as Mooney notes, classical Cartesianism appears m ore and more dead in the water. First, Dan Dennett (and others) said there is no little man, no Cartesian homunculus, making magic rationality decisions inside us.

Now, BBS et al say that, even if there were such a critter, he wouldn't be a disinterested rationalist anyway.

But, not all commenters on Mooney's post want to accept that, it seems.

I responded to one:

Nullius, (you seem to present) a great defense of the “traditional” view of reasoning or whatever …

BUT, I’m going to argue with you.

First, the “reasoning as argumentation” model I think explicitly says this is NOT, NOT, NOT, a “human failing.” Rather, it is, if I may, “human ISness.”

I won’t propose abandoning “rationalism,” but I will say that it is even more unnatural than you may want to admit.

And, that IS a conflict with Cartesianism, which postulates rationality is a cornerstone of homo sapiens.

Sorry, but, either you don’t get the degree of implications this involves, or …
You DO, unconsciously, understand precisely what is up and by your conscious argumentation, actually support the fact at hand.

Of course, maybe I have reasons for my argumentation.

Meanwhile, this SciAm blog explains some of the reasons for our irrationality, in terms of motivators.

What is "enlightenment," anyway?

I just got done reading John Horgan's "Rational Mysticism," a very good book. And, it provokes the question.

Is enlightenment recognizing there is no need for enlightenment? Is it recognizing that he self, the alleged target of enlightenment, is fleeting and changing? Is it recognizing that an alleged enlightenment experience cannot be seized, captured or chained up? Is it living in an "eternal" present that isn't eternal, only momentary, recognized as such, and therefore recognized as being incapable of being "lived in"? Is it accepting that life is often no more than muddling? Is it recognizing that there is no such thing as Big E-Enlightenment? Is it recognizing that while some experiences and moments may be more enlightening than others, there is no absolute enlightenment?

I think "enlightenment" of the best kind ultimately involves acceptance, in some way, shape or form. and, acceptance of one's self, and the self's circumstances, is usually at the bottom of that, followed by acceptance of the luck, arbitrariness and capriciousness of life.

So, viva Steven Weinberg!

Atheists are religious? Who'd have thunk?

A flawed poll indeed, from Gallup.

How can atheists be very religious, moderately religious or nonreligious? But, that's what Gallup claims. Gallup says:

Americans' degree of religiousness, as defined in this analysis, is based on responses to two questions asking about the importance of religion and church attendance, yielding the "very religious," "moderately religious," and "nonreligious" groups. (See page 2 for details of this classification procedure.)

Gallup does say that the effect is probably based on contact with others in a group.

Beyond that, this poll has other "issues."

The main one is, what is "wellbeing"? In the story about the poll, that's not really explained. Even if it is, that's a subjective issue. For some, it might be more a good partner relationship. For others, it might be a Maslow-type actualization. For others, it might be a $100,000-a-year job.

But, beyond that, what's with the nearly 3 percent of atheists/agnostics supposedly strongly religious?

In this case, it's bad linguistics. I guarantee.

After I wrote a newspaper column, years ago, about my non-metaphysical stances, I was asked to speak at a philosopher's club in Dallas. And, a philosophy professor at a community college told me he prayed regularly. (I had the good grace not to ask him directly, "To whom?")

Another, also illustrative anecdote. I started making a connection with a woman on Match.com several years ago who said she was an atheist. But, as she learned from me what that really meant, well, she "ran like hell." As vest I could figure from hindsight, to her, "atheist" meant something like "spiritual but not religious."

And, that's the problem with polls of his nature by somebody like Gallup — terms aren't clearly identified and nailed down.

Petrified wood, petrified psyche

PETRIFIED

Massive, towering trees
Were transformed into stone
In the twinkling of a geological eye.
All the remains petrified 300 million years.
As Heraclitus’ permanent change
Hit a wall of geochemical inertia.
So, too, can human attitudes, emotions and states
Suddenly and sharply change,
Then become frozen in the face of many a further assault —
Petrified.
Death is the final dissolve
But short of that, few life acids can eat away
Frozen fear, lithified anxiety, calcified cowering.
But the hurts themselves remain liquid,
Even if partially congealed;
Only the reaction and the framings become concretized.
And so, like marrow inside bone
New psychological antibodies still spew forth,
Even if fighting the wrong issues the wrong way —
Petrified to do anything else.
Life is often neither growth nor regression.

The Donner Party, struggle and motivation

California was a land of lore and lure even before John Marshall found gold traces in 1848.

Farming, ranching, mild climate and vast unclaimed, untamed acres all called across the Sierras to Americans, even before the land had been wrested from Mexico.
Among those listening?

Jacob Breen and family. George Keseberg. And, the eponymous Donner family.

Unlike the Founding Fathers, these people had no fortunes to give. But they did give most of what money they had to make the trip. And, they certainly, in cases such as Jacob Breen, had honor, whether sacred or not, to pledge to their fellow travelers.
While on vacation recently, I visited some Donner Party sites. Though I had driven I-80 before through the area, I had never gotten off the freeway at the Donner State Party site. And, since I had come from the north, on a California state highway site, about 7-8 miles north of the interstate, I saw the Donner Meadows, where the Donners themselves wintered in 1846-47.

I asked myself, rhetorically, what would I be willing to do to get to California today? How much work would I be willing to expend? How much of my current “baggage” would I be willing to discard? What is my goal in getting to California — am I moving to something or just away from something?

I haven’t pondered those questions too much yet. Maybe I’m deliberately avoiding them a little bit. Maybe, like many other things in life, I want a surer goal before committing to them more.

That said, let me look at the Donners more. Yes, they knew about California the potential agricultural paradise. But, gold had not yet been discovered. They were simply looking for a better life, not to get rich.

Beyond that, how much am I willing to surrender of my old self for change today, in general? As I get older, do I get more attached to what I already have? Less willing to take risks?

How much is pain in my current life, combined with hope for the future, going to be a motivator?
And, by the time I had gotten back home, or soon afterward, I had at least one additional question for myself.

Is the desire to move to California a search for a “geographic cure” for issues that need help in other ways?

All good questions. To some of them, I don’t yet consciously know the answers, though I may have partial answers in my subconscious. Others I can answer more fully right now.

As for a geographic cure? No. I’ve been interested in moving to California for years.
As for pain as a motivator? It may continue to grow, and maybe I need that.

And, “surrender,” or another term? How much am I willing to let go of old attachments, such as what job or career path I should or should not follow, how much anxiety I can tolerate in daily life and more? At least at the conscious level, I don’t have answers here, though I suspect that I have more letting go to do — letting go of preconceptions about myself, letting go of attachments to old emotional patters, and things like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_party

Anti-depressants beat CBT on personality help

I'm not a fan or touter of Big Pharma, nor do I denigrate talk therapy.

But, it seems that SSRI antidepressants are better than cognitive therapy in lowering neuroticism and raising extraversion in depressed people. CBT helps make changes there, too, but the changes are neither as profound nor as lasting as with medication.

Conditional-love parenting has its fallouts

Showing Dr. Phil and others, who oppose Carl Rogers’ ideas, quite wrong, studies show that conditional-love parenting produces, in essence, conditional self-esteem in children.

George Vaillant 42 years later

George Vaillant, a psychology professor at Harvard, inherited what was then the Grant Project. Under Vaillant’s hands, it became the largest- and longest-ever longitudinal study of human psychology.

Atlantic Monthly has an update on Vaillant’s work after 42 years.

Although not planned as such, the survey has many invaluable spinoffs, including seeing how manic-depressive or bipolar illness was eventually distinguished from schizophrenia, the state of development in psychology in general, information on human happiness and its whys, and more.

The more includes it becoming an invaluable longitudinal source on drug and alcohol addiction and recovery.

Apropos of that and other things, the Atlantic story has a couple of good rhetorical questions:

Can the good life be accounted for with a set of rules? Can we even say who has a “good life” in any broad way?

Probably not, unless, riffing on Thomas Szasz, we rely on groupthink societal definitions of what the “good life” is. Or, what “happiness” is, for that matter.

That said, Vaillant himself developed some intriguing findings about “positive” emotions:

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

I will vouch for that indeed.

Of course, so could Vaillant.

He got married three times, and after six years with Wife No. 3, went back to Wife No. 2.

Dreams mean – what you want and expect them to

That’s the bottom-line answer from the latest social science research into the field.

We may still not know WHY we dream, but as to what dreams mean?

Well, the research tells us our actual emotional state, beliefs, biases, etc. lead us to determine in advance of any “interpretation” which dreams we consider important and/or true, and which ones we don’t.

Anyway, this is the final nail in the coffin of Freudian, pseudo-Freudian and Jungian dream interpretation.

Nobody called, nobody wanted me

I forgot to turn on my cell phone yesterday.
Then, when I remembered
I had forgotten to turn it on,
I still didn’t turn it on
Until this evening.
But, nobody had called for me
Anyway.

No voicemails, no text messages.
Not even a list of missed calls.

I guess I’ll survive.

Do I have a choice?
Well, it seems pretty stupid otherwise.

I never thought I would appreciate
The wireless link to the outside world.

But, sometimes it relieves a bit of loneliness;
Is there anything so bad about that?
After all, farmers a century ago led our nation in suicides
Before the wireless waves of radio
Relieved the mind-numbing, stupefying tedium
Of life after dark
In the not-so-idyllic rural heartland.

So, before we overl8y bemoan
The electricity-gobbling technology of modern life,
Let us remember that many would-be Luddites
Actually do not want to make too far a trip
Back into the oh-so-idyllicized past.

Talk of carbon taxes, or traded caps,
Can be a time for reflection
At just what price we paid for our modern era,
And just what we have been paying to escape.

(It still would be nice, though,
To escape the sense, the expectation,
Of on-demand availability
Others may have of us now.
Or that we have of ourselves.)

-- Dec. 31, 2008

Haiku homage to Hume

Fleeting sensations
Momentary thought patterns
Consciousness wisps.

Like smoke, nothing is
Apprehendable; like fog,
Insubstanteous.

The wisps come and go
With no quantum gap between;
I can’t find myself.

Psychologist Hume
Metaphysician Descartes
A Scottish triumph.

With no I to think
Or outreason the Frenchman
What ‘Hume’ really won?

Nice guys win while clueless guys remain clueless

Two interesting, but not exactly earthshaking, studies on human psychology out there, one about “guys” as humans in general, and how being nice does “win” in the game of life, while the other quantifies what most women have long said, that guys are clueless about “reading” them.

First, the “nice guys” story. Researchers found that, after a while, the negative reinforcement of punishment loses its psychological reinforcement. The research involved multiple rounds of the prisoners’ dilemma game, with a higher-than-normal punishment level.

The reason I say this one isn’t totally earthshaking is the some part of the principle behind this has long been exemplified in the “good cop, bad cop” scheme. However, this goes beyond “good cop, bad cop” in cooperation vs. punishment between equals.

Perhaps semi-equals who run free-world situations, like tyrannical bosses, will sit up and take notice.

The second study?

Researchers found that men misread women’s friendliness as sexual signals.

Well, that’s the “no duh” insight of the year, right?

But, it also found that men misread women’s sexual signals as not being about sex but just friendship.

In other words, men misreading women isn’t related to male libido and sex focus, just to men not being so observant.

Prayer vs. self-insight in decision-making

I’ve long and often said, in riffing on the classical Western religious description of prayer as a “heart-to-heart talk with god,” that it’s really a “heart-to-heart talk with one’s self.”

First of all, once you recognize and accept that, even if you still believe in some sort of deity, you can’t pray to him/her/it; certainly not in the way you considered prayer to be before this light went on.

The flip side, though, of losing out on the belief of being able to tap into god as “deus quam machina,” no matter how capricious this machine is, one gets the empowerment, small as it may be, of being able to look to one’s own self for insight.

But, the flip side of that is that any decisions one makes can no longer be passed off, or buck-passed, to somebody else, as in “I thought god was telling me to, …” (Of course, if you still believe in a critter “downstairs,” you still have recourse to the infamous “the devil made me do it” plea.)

For me, probably in part as a reaction to events of childhood, I have trouble decision-making anyway. In part, it’s a fear of somebody — god (in my pre-conversion days), a boss, some other authority figure, or someone else to be affected by my decision — judging or criticizing me for making that decision. In fact, often, the decision itself isn’t the problem; facing up to the consequences, including this judgment, is.

And, now, I don’t have any god as daddy the tear-wiper, daddy the hand-holder, or daddy the giant daddy to make it all go away, to comfort me.

I have me, and human friend to whom to talk these fears out.

On the other hand, a god both omnipotent and omnibenevolent by definition can’t have an experiential concept of evil, psychological pain or sorrow anyway, and so is of limited use as a hand-holder.

All in all, lumps unfortunately included, I’m better off wrestling with my decision-making on the only plane I know we actually have, with the only, limited, human help I know is actually available.

What is religion?

I am not going to give you a Webster’s definition, nor a Latin etymology-based one. Instead, based on my own academic experience and insight, I am going to offer one of my own, which will also illustrate why, in contradistinction from many of its adherents, I consider Buddhism a religion.

First, I believe religion arises from the juncture of philosophy, psychology and sociology. Most people could readily see the first two, but sociology? Yes, even for a hermitic monk. Even that monk’s idea of religious expression and devotion were originally developed in a communal setting and out of guidelines developed by a religious community.

Second, looking at the main branches of philosophy, I see religion as being concerned with metaphysics, ethics, epistemology and ontology. Even Buddhism falls into the first area, on a couple of grounds. Karma, as a law, is not a law about material substances, but the metaphysical idea of reincarnation. And, even if Buddhists reject the idea of an individual soul or the collective atman, something metaphysical, that is, something beyond the material world, is believed to be reincarnated. Not that I agree with Paul Tillich’s use of words, but if we want to talk about “ultimate grounds of being,” Buddhism has one, as I see it.

Ethics is obvious. By that, I am not saying that it is the primary, let alone sole, preserve of religions, just that every religion has some ethical focus. It may be minor in some, great in others, but it’s there.

Epistemology? Yes. Every religion is teleological in some way, and its mythos is in part, to riff on Aristotle, an attempt to explain either an efficient or a final cause of things.

Ontology connects with metaphysics as to the nature of what that cause might be, the nature of metaphysical objects, and the nature of anything, be it individual soul or individualized soul or not, the nature of humanity.

And, there is where psychology enters. Psychology in religion is about more than faith in the religious sense of “hope in things unseen.” Rather, it’s about how one orients toward the ultimate object of one’s concern, whether a personal God with a salvific-based resurrection, or moving beyond karma and its rounds of reincarnation to a depersonalized nirvana. As part of that, I can’t think of a major religion that doesn’t have prayer or something roughly analogous to it.

Magical thinking? I’d say “delusional”

This New York Times article builds in large part on the work of people like Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran.

But, as Hume pointed out, “is” (in the naturalistic sense) does NOT imply “ought” in morals and ethics. It sure as hell doesn’t, and shouldn’t, in metaphysics.

It’s a control issue, and escapism. The article points out, rightly, that magical thinking is strongest when people feel most helpless. But, especially in today’s world, that’s exactly when people should instead engage in something like rational-emotive or cognitive-behavioral therapy on themselves.

Magical thinking is ultimately the ultimate surrender of control.

That said, I can certainly appreciate, understand and even empathize with the emotions often behind magical thinking, especially when it’s magical thinking related to something serious, like trauma, and not something trivial, like allegedly influencing a sports contest.

That doesn’t mean it’s any more true… just that it’s a lot more potent.

The church was silent

This is an autobiographical poem. My father was a Lutheran pastor, from the main conservative Lutheran denomination, and when I was 9 or 10 years old, a man came into our church during Ash Wednesday services. After church, he told dad he was demon-possessed and wanted an exorcism.

Well, we had a psychiatrist who was a member, and at church that night. He picked up the phone and called the main local hospital and made the necessary arrangements for the man (I’m guessing a schizophrenic) to be admitted.

Meanwhile, though, rather than do a mock exorcism or try a real one, my dad said, “I can’t do that,” or similar. I understood him to be saying, “I don’t have the power to do that.”

I knew the “longer ending” of Mark had Jesus explicitly giving his disciples power to cast out demons in his name. Earlier in Mark, chapter 6, he sounds out the 12 disciples, in a passage accepted as authentic from all early manuscripts, and “gave them authority over evil spirits.”

Now, my dad was working on a graduate degree involving comparative religion of different American Indian tribes and groups. We lived at the edge of the Navajo Reservation. And he took seriously things such as witchcraft.

So, to hear him say, “I can’t do that,” well, read on.

THE CHURCH WAS SILENT

The church was silent
The darkness as thick as death
The fear oppressive.

The demoniac
Came seeking deliverance
From reverend dad.

“I don’t have power
To accomplish that,” said he.
Wilting at the call.

For the first time, then,
Reverend dad did stumble
And loose all his masks.

The clinging velvet
Of fear-born suffocation
Was, was that darkness.

My liberation
Began that night in Gallup
The night dad fell short.

My fear of the dark
Was already within me
From other sources.

This was little more
Trinity’s darkness little more
Than the other fears.

A bit more of fear
Was a small price to pay, then
For liberation.

Liberation from
Old ideas began that night.
In Trinity dark.

- Written July 1, 2001