This theme cuts to the heart, or the Insula, on matters that have caused me some serious personal angst. Here’s hoping it doesn’t come off as merely a self-serving therapeutic exercise. Well, maybe that’s exactly what it has generated…but I mean well.
Our deepest of feelings never quite make it into the educative field. We are extremely influenced by emotion and yet we prevent it from breaking forth in our schools.
The only information I caught from Googling the theme had to do primarily with how to control or prevent deep emotions from surfacing in classrooms. Why have we avoided permitting primal innate feelings to emerge between students and instructors in classrooms? Moral decision-making has to allow for at least an element of profound emotion. Why should we not model that kind of learning in classrooms and workplaces? Schools at all levels are virtually devoid of it. Genuine intimacy is not only ignored but intentionally suppressed. Do we fear those breakthroughs? Is it the unknown we dread? If we’ve never accepted that kind of behavior; tested it or allowed for it, how do we know if it will either lead to out-of-control mayhem or a greater form of education?
Not until I entered graduate school did I have a chance to deal with my buried emotions in the context of being educated. Students were required to undergo group psychotherapy. It was a way of weeding out those who were attempting to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. The process was led by a professor, and a therapist who became known in our sessions as the ‘Needler.’ We had other names for him but…He was in our face from day one, demanding to know who we were, what we wanted out of life and how we dealt with our deepest feelings. He pushed us to reveal our love needs, fears, anger, rage and sexual tensions. The Needler was not a fun guy. We pretty much hated him during the endless sessions but he managed to push enough to enable us to reach levels of sentiments we had never admitted to or knew they existed. I’m certain the relentless process caused me to engage more deeply in the academic course work, especially in the field of ethics.
While speaking at a clergy conference recently I admitted I had felt a need to take an additional semester of therapy in seminary. A classmate present at the meeting stood up and announced that I didn’t opt to enroll for another semester that year. He pointed out he and I were told we needed more therapy. I hadn’t recalled it that way but I should have had a clue when I was turned down for my preliminary ordination orders due to anger issues.
Surviving a ‘Gay Plunge’
Can we learn anything worthwhile in an atmosphere of extreme fear? One of the most profound and yet traumatic learning experiences of my life took place in the mid-1960s while in seminary. Our professor informed the class one day we had an opportunity to sign up for a three-day homosexual ‘plunge’ in San Francisco. San Francisco? Me, I’m imagining right off the bat a group immersion in a hot tub.
The gay community there was inviting theological students to meet with a cross-section of gay professionals, from single male prostitutes to couples who had lived together in committed relationships for twenty to forty years. The twenty-five students in our class would be matched up one-on-one for three days and nights with twenty-five gay men to learn about their life styles and environments.
I was reluctant to attend given I had been molested by a Scout Master and his assistant for a week at a camp when I was 13. I agonized for two months over whether or not to participate. I finally signed on. When we arrived at the site of the event in San Francisco we walked into a room comprised of twenty-five men that afternoon and we were immediately matched up one-on-one with gay persons who were assigned to guide us through the Tenderloin gay area of the city for three days and nights. The experience of entering the room and being met by a two-dozen ‘straight looking,’ highly dignified gentlemen caught me off guard. I was expecting to encounter aggressive gay men. They were respected business leaders, bankers, attorneys and engineers. It was an awkward, rather intimidating moment, and when it was obvious the straight seminary class members appeared uneasy with the pairing up arrangement the facilitator assigned one gay participant to be with two class members.
We started out by becoming acquainted with each other’s backgrounds and sharing our plans for the future. We then went to gay bars and other establishments where our host explained to us the unwritten rules of protocol for meeting in those social settings. The experience was fascinating but also threatening in the crowded pubs. Later that evening we met with a young man who was an active prostitute and worked the streets of the inner city. We also visited with gay partners that had lived together for nearly 45 years.
After the tours we met in the evenings to debrief and reflect upon our experiences. The sessions turned out to be a form of heavy group therapy where we were pressed to share our honest impressions of what we had experienced on our visits. The sessions created more anxiety than the threatening encounters in the bars and on the streets, partly because we were in a hit-and-run emotional pressure cooker. My host asked me, for example, why I had managed to wind up standing back-to-back with my classmate in each bar. “Did you expect to be patted on the butt in those settings?” he inquired. “Would butt-patting be acceptable in decent heterosexual social settings?” When I denied the back-to-back defensive posturing he simply smiled and said, “I watched you both maneuver around to protect your backsides in each bar and my hunch is you were not even conscious of what you were attempting to do.”
The confrontational session on the last evening, a chance to run deep and depart, was probably the turning point for me in my willingness to allow myself to truly experience the feelings of a gay person. I guess my purpose for entering into that emotional arena was to come to know the pain and suffering within the lives of gay persons and not to connect with the intellectual and emotional power, dignity and talents they might possess. I probably approached the event with the assumption I was coming from a superior, ‘stable’ position, visiting a fragile camp of oppressed people to provide emotional and intellectual resources that might benefit their needs.
Reading publications written about or by gays and lesbians had not impacted me deeply enough to alter my views on the issue prior to the three-day ‘plunge.’ Attending seminars on the subject of homosexuality, hearing articulate persons share their stories and meeting in small groups with gay persons on ‘safe’ familiar turf did not help me turn that corner either. I had the assurance that we would travel to a city 500 miles away from my place of residence and enter into a one-shot learning experience and have the promise there would be no commitment to relate beyond that event. The other aspect that opened my senses on the spot had to do with the element of fear present in the process. I was aware throughout those three days of experiencing a rapid heartbeat, sweaty palms, and being in a constant state of low-grade anxiety. When I returned home I had a headache, rare for me, that lasted two weeks, probably induced by my reasoning faculties battling it out with my deepest of emotions.
Surviving a ‘Family Plunge’
But, and this is a major consideration and a word of warning, we need to also take into account the deep genuine fear and possibly terror of those who cannot accept gays. My sister belonged to an Episcopal church for over 50 years. When the denomination elected a gay bishop she left her beloved priest and church. Within a month of the departure she was hospitalized with a rapid heartbeat condition. I called the IC unit at the hospital and talked with her son and asked him if she might like a visit from her priest. My nephew said “Just a minute, Uncle Buzz, hang on and I’ll ask her.” He came back on the phone to let me know that when he asked, her heart-rate peaked out on the monitor.
Can controversial topics contribute to fatalities? How many silent deaths have occurred over the last fifty years in Intensive Care Units over divisive issues? We Methodists have argued intensely over the gay issue for at least half-a-century. I love my younger sister, not just because she provided me with some gorgeous dates with her classmates while in high school but because she became a cherished friend.
So, obviously my sibling and I possess two different fields of ‘truth-feeling.’ How do we enter into each other’s deep-seated reality realms? We will have to risk drawing near our pain, fear, anger and possibly rage. It is rare when adversaries do dare go there because it calls for one-on-one interaction. Who wants to mess with their demise or that of a loved one attempting that? My sister and I have tried it around the edges but it has not been easy. I can protest publically but that course can minimize the intensity of the pain and fear. When I have gone public on contentious matters by way of street demonstrations there was little obvious suffering, dread or tears expressed among the participants. Mother Teresa was heard to say “Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.”
We in Arizona who are supportive of immigration and opposing our Senate bill to profile the undocumented need to be aware of those on the other side of the issue who can experience deep legitimate fear. While protesting the bill at the state capital last year I had a chance to talk briefly after the event with an elderly woman who was supporting the bill. She was in tears and I believe in some pain for fear her kids and grandkids might not be able to have access to ICUs or urgent care centers in the future given the invasion of immigrants in the state. She might become a candidate for an IC unit in the near future. Well, hey, maybe by engaging deeply with her angst I may wind up in one.
Aeschylus, the Greek dramatist, declared
“There are times when fear is good. It must keep its watchful place at the heart’s controls. There is advantage in wisdom won from pain.”
{ 1 comment }