Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Category: Culture

  • We Can Do Better

    This post breaks from my usual psycho-spiritual explorations of Self to addressing a material, social reality: the problem of incarceration in the United States of America. According to 11 Facts about America’s Prison Population, the current prison population has quadrupled since 1980, and a significant portion of that population are nonviolent drug offenders. Per Human Rights Watch:

    “While accounting for only 13 percent of the US population, African Americans represent 28.4 percent of all arrests.  According to Bureau of Justice Statistics approximately 3.1 percent of African American men, 1.3 percent of Latino men, and 0.5 percent of white men are in prison.  Because they are disproportionately likely to have criminal records, members of racial and ethnic minorities are more likely than whites to experience stigma and legal discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, jury service, and the right to vote.

    Whites, African Americans, and Latinos have comparable rates of drug use but are arrested and prosecuted for drug offenses at vastly different rates.  African Americans are arrested for drug offenses, including possession, at three times the rate of white men.” [Emphasis added.]

    Incarceration is one step in a cycle. People with criminal records are released from prison without income, without guaranteed housing, without guaranteed jobs, without substantively better skills and resources, and often with increased trauma as a result of their imprisonment. They get dropped back into the world and expected to participate in a culture that actively stigmatizes them. Criminal activity might be the only survival skill they know, the only skill available. Families and communities are decimated by the cycle of incarceration and recidivism. People in higher socioeconomic classes might have more resources to buffer these losses. For people in lower socioeconomic classes, these consequences can be catastrophic.

    The war against drugs has eroded our civil liberties and significantly harmed people of color. Building and staffing prisons has become a for-profit enterprise that costs states $21,000-33,000 per year. We would do more to stabilize our communities if we spent that money on housing and services for offenders. Incarcerating offenders in violent, repressive systems with other offenders does not promote social wellness. Even Newt Gingrich called our prison system “graduate schools in criminality.”

    This is not about eschewing justice and ignoring the harm done. This is about how Justice as a value and civic virtue has twisted against our better nature to perpetuate systems of social inequality, and how fear and systemic racism continue to feed off each other. When we focus on punishing offenders more than creating healthy, resilient communities, we perpetuate cycles of injustice, poverty, and racism. We can do better than this. Organizations already exist that are attempting to create societies without prisons. Even if you do not endorse the complete abolition of prisons, we need their voices to find some better way.

  • Sacred Marriage: I Am… Sasha Fierce

    After my lengthy close reading of archetypes, identity, and relationship in Beyoncé’s album B’Day, I debated whether to continue the exploration for later albums. This series of explorations comes out of a long-term series of conversations with my best friend Woods. Both of us are around the artist’s age and were in college together when she released her first solo album. We regularly discussed her music and her presentation of her particular intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Earlier this year, I read an article by Nitsuh Abebe called “Why Can’t Beyoncé Have It All?” This article seemed to summarize everything we had ever discussed and contained this gem: “A few years ago, ­Beyoncé “killed” Sasha Fierce—or, rather, reintegrated Sasha, a process I wish Carl Jung were alive to ask her about.” As someone who is perhaps inordinately fascinated by both Jung and Beyoncé, this stuck out to me as an invitation and challenge. In re-listening to her works, I perceived creative alchemy, a unique process of individuation that has continued with her recent creative emergence, Beyoncé.

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  • What is the Unconscious?

    Western culture has internalized enough psychological language and insight as to give even the most uninterested person a casual understanding of concepts like the unconscious, at least to have heard a joke or cliché. This kind of awareness does not always carry with it the understanding of why anyone should care about the unconscious or how it could help us live a life of depth, meaning, and integrity.  

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  • Apologizing With Self-Respect

    I have been a person who says “I’m sorry” a lot. Recently, I have noticed apologizing when I’ve done nothing wrong — someone bumped into my chair, for example. In the culture of the United States, this is considered a bad quality, particularly for a man:  “I’m sorry” suggests I’m taking responsibility for a wrong, or lack confidence to take up space. Women in the United States are often reinforced to apologize for taking up space of inconveniencing others, culturally reinforced to make themselves physically small and unobtrusive. In some cultures, a person would be considered arrogant and boorish for failing to apologize and take others into consideration. We do lose an element of civility and mutual regard when we fail to take any notice of having inconvenienced or hurt someone. A friend once suggested substituting “excuse me” for times when I want to say “I’m sorry.” This may be a small gesture of politeness, but mutual civility is fed by such small gestures.

    The complexity of gender, space, and consideration is brilliantly illustrated by the tumblr Men Taking Up Too Much Space On The Train. Image after image reveals what appear to be masculine or male-bodied individuals taking up more space on public transit than is necessary, at times crowding out others.  Apologies and self-minimization is met by those who take up more space than is necessary, who seem unconcerned by their impact on others. These folks either think they have no reason to apologize or think that to apologize is to show weakness. The problem, to their minds, is that others are too sensitive or did not recognize what the offender really “meant” to do. The people taking up too much space on the train might not mean to inconvenience others, for example, but they are.

    We see public figures causing harm or offense with their words and actions and then going through a fake ritual of conciliation. They say something to the effect of “I’m sorry you’re mad at me” and sign up for a sensitivity course. They say, “I was misunderstood or taken out of context.” They seem unaware of the harm done, they’ve taken  no time to contemplate. The apology is about smoothing over image.

    Photo by Greg Rakozy

    Apologizing does not have to mean, “I was completely wrong and you were completely right.” An apology accepts responsibility for a specific harm I have done. I may still be struggling to understand your hurt or offense, but I can listen to and appreciate that I have caused harm. I can recognize how I contributed to the situation, what I did that was not in line with my values. You may have done something that I feel justifiably angry about, and I can recognize that my behavior was not honorable.

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  • B’Day and the Virgin Queen

    An archetype is a shape, a meta-form, or collection of attributes and energies expressed in multiple forms. The concept calls back to Plato’s Theory of Forms that suggests every material thing has a mold or imprint of a kind, an abstraction that is the perfect and whole predecessor from which all material objects of its kind emerge. As we exist in materiality and specificity, we cannot comprehend the archetypal energy directly, we can only explore the world in all its messiness and complexity and, through specificity, uncover many facets of the archetype. To define an archetypal energy neatly is to separate out a facet from the whole. When we look at our humanity and creative expressions, we can view these things through archetypal lenses but lose something important when we reduce things to neat, cut-and-dried archetypes that become simply stereotypes. Archetypes are productive, dynamic energies, whereas stereotypes become closed, deadening shells. Yet as humans influenced by archetypal energies through story and culture, we can become identified with these concepts. This is a source of strength and a significant impediment, a narrowing of vision until we fixate on a particular role that does not include all who we are.

    Beyoncé’s 2006 album B’Day explores the archetypal Virgin in contemporary life. With this reading, I want to acknowledge some biographical material from Beyoncé’s life that is relevant but largely focus on the text of the album. I make no assumptions that my reading has anything to do with her lived experience.

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  • Respect, Privilege, and Pluralism

    Recently I wrote about honor and humility as personal values. I want to speak of the combination of these values, Respect, as a civic virtue. To demonstrate respect is to show regard for, consideration of, and esteem for another person and their way of being. At its most basic, treating someone with respect is to communicate through actions a sense of worthiness, validity, and self-authority. When respect informs my behavior toward myself or others, everything seems to run more smoothly. Disagreements are conducted honorably with mutual regard, praise is offered and received graciously, and help is offered appropriately and accepted with gratitude. Respect is a value that I am working to include in more of my life and one I think is the bedrock of a civil society and badly needed in a pluralist one.

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  • Nurturing and Justice

    Our earth is in need of nurturing. Our dominant cultural trend has been toward believing ourselves to be separate from the environment, yet we are increasingly becoming aware of the consequences of that belief. In many ways, humans act like an invasive species overrunning our waters and lands with activity, exhausting the environment and damaging local ecosystems without natural predators who might check our activity and keep the web of life in balance. As we are conscious beings, capable of reflection and change, we are capable of changing our relationship to the world. We are capable of building new reef to begin to replace what has been destroyed. We care for the sick and wounded animals who have been hurt by our actions, but we are not doing enough to restore balance.

    So too in our culture. In the United States, we are still left with the legacy of our history that continues to perpetuate systems of injustice that disenfranchise our citizens. We have made strides toward equality of law for LGBT people, and yet the most vulnerable among us still get kicked out of their homes, struggle to find and keep jobs, or support their health. Those of us with a measure of privilege live with a near-unconscious terror of any threat to that privilege, a fear of losing everything if we lose anything, and close our eyes and ears to this suffering.

    I think nurturing can seem scary to many of us, especially when we have been hurt or felt unloved. Some of us fear that opening our hearts to care or listen to another person means losing all capacity for reason or setting boundaries. If I make eye contact with this person asking for money, or engage them in a conversation, then I fear I will end up giving them my wallet and letting them sleep in my bed. If I acknowledge to this person that I love that I was wrong about one thing, then I fear losing all ground and having to surrender my needs completely. We do not have to go all the way. I think this all or nothing mentality only speaks to the unmet need within us to nurture and hold boundaries. If we cannot acknowledge the need and act upon it, then the need grows more looming and terrifying. Our hearts grow stronger, however, when we face another to give as much as we are willing to give and refuse to give what we are unwilling to give.

    We are in need of nurturing, and nurturing is not the same as doing everything for another person. Nurturing is that loving approach to helping others and ourselves feel loved, valued, and capable. To build coral reefs and control invasive species is to nurture life in the oceans. We can cultivate the conditions of balance and justice in our seas, in our hearts, and in our country. Those of us with privilege can can listen to the stories of being terrorized by the forces meant to protect us without trying to convince ourselves that these people are lying, exaggerating, or wrong. We can take another step and try to work together to transform these systems, and not arrogantly assume that we can solve the problem if we have never experienced this kind of discrimination.

    I want to open my heart to greater justice and balance in this world. I want my actions to work toward this justice. The thought terrifies me, and I want to keep going.

    Though these links are incomplete and subject to debate, here are some possibilities for taking action:

  • A Public Apology to the LDS Church

    This entry is of a more personal nature than the usual fare. I want to acknowledge and apologize for desecrating the sacred text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, something I did approximately twelve years ago.

    The context and details of the act are included in an essay of mine that was published, “Without a Trace.” That essay characterizes well and thoroughly the mindset I was in at the time, but I will provide some context. I had spent two summers working as a closeted gay man for a Boy Scout camp, becoming increasingly frustrated by my complicity in my own oppression (by not speaking out) and by the surrounding forces that contributed to my oppression. I feared coming out, or being discovered to be gay, and losing my job.

    A friend of mine wore a Rainbow ribbon as a sign favoring gay rights, with no other comment, and received a complaint from an LDS Scout group. At the same time, most LDS Scout groups provided us the staff with copies of the Book of Mormon. This inequality between what was allowed to be promoted was a problem for me, as was my understanding of the Mormon church’s influence in continuing the Boy Scouts’ policy excluding gay membership and leadership.

    My experience of oppression and feelings of powerlessness ultimately led to an impulse decision, toward the end of my last summer, to publicly burn one of the Mormon texts. The act was petty, hateful, small, and I regret it completely. We have every right to disagree with and criticize each other, even to work against each other’s values in favor of our own, but what I did disrespected a faith tradition and source of meaning and purpose for many people, including people I have since come to know and respect, both within and departed from the LDS faith.

    As the act was done publicly, and recorded in a published text, I have thought that at some point in my life I would need to publicly apologize for it. I wrote it into the essay because it was true, because it was part of that experience. I do not think I glamorized or attempted to justify the action. Recently, however, I have been thinking about the incident a lot, and my own sense of integrity, and decided I needed to make an additional step. The Mormon church recently gave tacit approval to changing the Boy Scout policy to including gay youth, a step I acknowledge and celebrate even as I would wish for more change toward inclusion of LGBT adults and trans youth.

    Ultimately, I want to acknowledge this because what I did has weighed on my heart, and I do not know any way to make it right. I cannot pretend to have come around to a great understanding of the Mormon faith or sudden appreciation of our differences. What I realize now, with the luxury of more than a decade’s reflection, is that my anger was used destructively, out of pettiness, when I could have directed it toward constructive conversation. I also realize that I value the existence of spiritual and faith traditions, and my actions were not in accord with the person I want to be or the society in which I want to live. I’m not a public figure and have but a few publications, and perhaps fewer people will read this than read the essay, but I need to say this.

    I am sorry, and I will try to do better.

  • Power and Compassion

    “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

    This quote is from Martin Luther King Jr., who was not Pagan yet speaks to the value pairing of power and compassion as voiced in The Charge of the Goddess. As a person raised in the Catholic tradition and taught by social justice advocates, the value of justice seems to me one expression of spiritual devotion, not necessarily bound by a particular creed but emerging from a deepening relationship with all-that-is.

    Compassion is our capacity to feel empathy for others while remembering that we are separate. Both qualities are important to compassion. The extent to which I can empathize with my own feelings is the limit of my ability to empathize with others’. The ability to differentiate between my feelings and others’ affects my capacity to tolerate empathy and respond accurately.

    Empathy leads to meaningful, intimate relationships with my self and others. Conflict, avoidance, and hurtful relationships often coincide with failure to empathize. A seeming contradiction: we are hard-wired for empathy. “Mirror neurons” in our brains cause us to sense an echo of the experiences we see. If someone is in pain, we feel it in ourselves, whether consciously or not. We are emotionally susceptible, often influenced by the strongest emotions in the room, especially when those feelings are not named. Naming is the cognitive process whereby we begin to differentiate our experience from others’.

    The failure to accurately empathize and differentiate leads to problems. We start avoiding people who are angry or in pain when what they need most is connection. We let relationships fall apart. We allow widespread social ills to continue because we have numbed ourselves to suffering. We also rush to “fix” others’ problems just to stop their suffering so we can feel better. We don’t listen to what the other person really needs, and give them what we think we can, compounding the original suffering with feelings of being unheard, invisible, worthless.

    Already we are looking at power with compassion. Power is our ability to act, to do. When compassion fails, we use or fail to use our power in ways that are hurtful. Intolerance for facing our feelings, or that of others, robs us of the ability to act. We would do almost anything, including nurture our own suffering and resentment, and not face the raw pain, anger, and disappointment of another.

    To value power comes with taking responsibility for the conditions of my life and taking action. When I feel overwhelmed by anger or despair, when my needs aren’t being met, or when someone else’s bad mood is draining me, I can return to power by naming, saying these things out loud, to myself or to another person. When I see another suffering, I can abdicate power by looking away or blaming that person for what they’re living, or I can ask myself what power do I have in this moment to be of help? Better yet, I can ask the person who is suffering: What do you need?

    Much suffering comes from power unchecked with compassion, and much suffering comes from feelings of powerlessness. When we feel trapped with no recourse, no escape, and no control, we are more likely to experience that state of “learned helplessness” that resembles depression. Anxiety, too, is another facet of powerlessness, in which we respond to our lack of control with rigidity and mental strategies to gain illusory control.

    These states of being become ironic. When a person feels powerless, often they exert an inordinate amount of control over their environment. Think of a person who blows up about the slightest provocation or who convinces others to tend to their needs by constantly emphasizing their own fragility. This person is not lying. They have no power inside, no resources to manage their inner distress, and therefore must control their surroundings with whatever strategies they know. Disowning power in this way contributes to relationships fraught with unspoken assumptions, fears, and resentments. Accepting our power does not mean we can or will do everything by ourselves, but it means we can ask and negotiate to make sure our needs are met.

    No matter what condition we are in, something is possible. When I feel powerless or overwhelmed, I ask myself, “What power do I have now?” Sometimes the answers surprise me. I may have the power to ask for more information, ask for help, to run away, to avoid or engage. I may find he power to accept the situation I’m in, paradoxically revealing a new way out.

    Power begins in our bodies. I might be able to move a hand, to blink, feel or hear, I can listen or speak.  If anything, I may have the power to keep breathing. If I can breathe, I am alive, and something is possible.

    This is part three of a series of posts for the Pagan Values Project and working with the values from the Charge of the Star Goddess.

  • Mirth and Reverence

    June is Pagan Values Month and I want to spend some effort articulating how my vision is shaped by values that come from a Pagan perspective.

    In the Charge of the Goddess, a text that influences many Goddess-oriented and modern witchcraft traditions,  Doreen Valiente wrote:

    Let my worship be within the heart that rejoiceth, for behold: all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals. And therefore let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honour and humility, mirth and reverence within you.

    These two sentences articulate a clear, expansive, and complex vision of values. One might base an entire life’s practice attempting to embody these words. What I want to focus on in particular are the pairings of the second sentence. Each value pair may balance, deepen, or refine each other.

    Starting from the last: mirth and reverence. These values feel antagonistic. In our public debates, religious communities seem to take increasingly hard-line stances against anything that appears critical or mocking of their faiths. Some traditions, overtly or covertly, frown upon any expression of joy or humor, suppressing the Holy Trickster and making it a demon, or agent of unholy chaos.

    Meanwhile we have comedians, movies, TV shows, and everyday folks who insist on unfettered freedom to insult, ridicule, and offend whomever. Anyone who might criticize this comedy is often dismissed as humorless and needing to relax, unable to take a joke, or infringing on the person’s freedom of speech, often with a rigidity that reveals the own comedian’s tendency to take themselves too seriously.

    When I notice polarization or extremes in a culture, I perceive each in reaction to the other. Each side has something of value to offer the wider conversation, and that value is often lost in the rigidity and tension that occurs as a result of polarization.

    Reverence demonstrates deep and solemn respect. Reverence comes from my ability to set aside my ego and personality and consider something of great importance and deep mystery, something so profound and sacred that it is worthy of care and protection. This reverence is my connection to a larger sense of meaning in which I exist, in which I as a seeker can taste but never fully apprehend. Reverence is often articulated through a religious framework, but I have heard agnostics and atheists discuss their sense of wonder at nature, the universe, and science with a language of reverence. We do not need a God or Gods to be reverent, but many of us find we speak the truth of our experience when we speak of deities.

    The worthiness of care and protection feels salient. From a wholly rational perspective, we may struggle to understand why some groups would suffer hardship or death to protect things that they consider sacred. We may ourselves fail to understand why we cannot simply throw away reminders of the past. The reasons are often irrational, which does not mean meaningless. Meaning arises from our reverence of these irrational impulses. We may preserve or restore the beauty of the natural world because its existence fills us with wonder, or we consider it the living body of the Goddess, or because we believe God calls us to be nature’s steward. Each view seems to share a perspective that nature has a right to exist for itself, because of some intrinsic quality, not because of what it does for us.

    The humor I find least humorous and most offensive (particularly because it is the least humorous) often lacks any quality of reverence. In our culture, we use the word “irreverent” as a high compliment to artists and comedians, but irreverence only has meaning where reverence exists. So many racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist “jokes” have at their core an essential emptiness or hatred for the objects of the joke. I grew up as a White man often read as straight in a Midwestern state, and have heard many of these. The worst of these jokes are simply reiterations of tired stereotypes or not-so-veiled justifications of abuse, torture, and murder.

    There are jokes, however, that cleverly skewer these stereotypes, or skewer the culture and structures of all the oppressive “isms.” There are jokes that are funny when told within the community, by someone who knows the community, but are not funny when someone outside the community tells them. I do not see this as hypocritical or hypersensitivity, since I see this in every group. (See the comments to any feminist blog posting that criticizes men or patriarchy, or any blog criticizing Whiteness and white supremacy, to see the sensitivity of White men.) The difference, I think, is one of reverence. If I know you see me as a human being and can joke with love, then I will feel more easy about laughing with you. If either of those things is already in question, then one is naturally going to be on defense.

    Within our communities and traditions, however, we can find more freedom if we let a little more mirth into our lives. Some people seem to fear that any joke will shatter the fragile trappings of favor and fortune, and lose the joy in living. Mirth makes our worship vibrant, mirth gets the blood flowing in our lives, mirth makes an unbearable situation a source of unexpected delight. There’s no humor so redemptive as dark humor.

    ETA: I think this post by Patton Oswalt is exemplary of the dialogue between mirth and reverence.