Category Archives: Maturity

Hubble galaxy

Research Project

I am doing research around the intersection of science and theology and how communities may support or inhibit that conversation.  I would love to talk to you about your experience. Here are the questions I am exploring.

  • Community:  With what communities do you identify and why?  Which ones solicit your time and attention and why do you choose to engage?  What do you get from it? [Do you differentiate organizations of which you are a member, and communities of which you are a part?]
  • Spirituality:  Do you have a sense of the spiritual, or of the larger questions about the purpose of your life, or the degree to which those powers outside your control have any interest in your wellbeing?  Do you have a preferred religious language with which to speak about your spirituality?
  • Spiritual practices:  How do you connect to your spirituality and deepen your relationship to it?  Are there practices you use? Does this awareness happen when you are alone, or is it mediated and supported for you by your participation in community?
  • Science and Spirituality:  You are likely to be of a community that speaks the language of science.  Are science and spirituality domains of your life that are totally separate or do they mutually meet?  How do you relate them or allow them to inform each other?

Rev. Dr. Mark Lee Robinson

314-853-9385

Mark@JustConflict.org

Offender Assessment for Judge Kavanaugh

I have closely watched the ever-breaking news about the allegations against Supreme Court Nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh.  I was able to watch much of the testimony before the Judiciary Committee on Thursday.  And I am aware that I am seeing these events through a rather different lens than do most people.

I am a pastoral counselor and psychotherapist who has spent most of my adult life working in the field of intimate violence.  While I have worked with many victims, I have mostly done intervention with men accused of battering, incest, and/or sexual assault.  In the sex offender group I led in the 90’s we kept a seat open for Bill Clinton. It is from that experience that I have learned a way of looking at these events from a somewhat different perspective.

Many experts in sexual abuse have weighed in about the behavior of Dr. Ford.  She remembers some aspects very clearly and others not at all.  She has been hesitant to divulge experience which was clearly harmful to her.  Some who know her well never heard about this event.  These are all very common behaviors on the part of sexual assault victims.

But I haven’t seen any reflections from colleagues who work with offenders so I am offering my own.

Over the course of a nearly 40-year career I have interviewed at least hundreds and perhaps a thousand men who have been accused of some form of intimate abuse that was criminal in nature.   Not all of these men were people I believed were guilty of the accusations.  Some people are falsely accused.

Sometimes I am asked by local court services to do evaluations of accused and convicted offenders to assess their need for counseling intervention.  I have to be able to read sometimes subtle cues to determine what is going on in the mind of someone who is trying hard to convince me of what he wants me to believe.  It is this lens that I bring to the matter of the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh.

First let me say that the issue is not what happened.  It is largely unknowable to anyone who wasn’t there.  The issue is what is happening now.  The question is not, did he do it, but do we want him on the Supreme Court.  That he did some foolish and even perhaps mean things when he was a teenager doesn’t disqualify him.  We have all behaved badly.  The issue is whether he brings to the Court a perspective and attitude that will enhance justice in our nation.  What we thus look at is how he represents himself now.

Nearly everyone wants to be seen as innocent.  That he proclaims his innocence is not at all unusual.  I was initially surprised at the level of emotion he was willing to bring to the table because he is, after all, a judge.  But he was not being judicial.  He floridly expressed rage against forces that are conspiring to take away something to which he is entitled.  His assertion is that he is the one who is the victim here and that he is a good person.

One of the strongest markers by which to discern whether the accused believe they are innocent is the strength by which they insist that they are a good person.  Those who know they didn’t do it are not so motivated to make a case that they are a good person.  Their goodness is not at issue.  But when someone has done something which is clearly harmful to another and which they are eager to deny, they do it by countering that they are good.  “I am good, therefore, I could not have done this.”

Another marker is the degree to which they are curious about how it came to be that they have been accused.  There apparently are a couple of men who have come forward to claim they were the attackers.  Judge Kavanaugh was smart to not collude with them.  But he is not curious about how Dr. Ford became so convinced that he was her attacker.  Indeed, he didn’t watch her testimony.  Men who are innocent are curious about how they came to be accused.

And the third marker is that men who are innocent, or men who are guilty and repentant, are emotionally softer.  They respond with careful introspection to the questions they are asked.  When they are asked a question they haven’t thought of before they sit with it and mull it over.  When Judge Kavanaugh was asked a question he didn’t like, he gave an answer that was something he had already said, and in some instances, had said several times.  He had a game plan.  He had a strategy.  When someone wanted to go somewhere not on his map he would go back to what he wanted to talk about.

I can’t know what happened thirty years ago.  But I know that at the hearing of the Judiciary Committee Judge Kavanaugh appeared to me to be a man whose past was catching up to him and who was desperate to preserve the privilege that is his due.

 

Letter to Christine: what he could have said

Dear Christine,

I have not thought of you for many years but you are very much in my thoughts today since I learned of your memories of our encounter at a party when we were in high school. I am shocked and saddened by what you recall of me from those days.

I wish I could apologize for what I did, but I truthfully don’t remember. I remember you. I remember the house and the people who you recall were there, and I remember that there were times when I got stumbling drunk. I just don’t remember assaulting you.

I remember being uncertain about my own masculinity and feeling pressure from other males to be more sexually aggressive. I remember my adolescent feelings of sexual desire. But I don’t remember assaulting you.

I am so sorry that you have had to struggle for healing from what I am unable to remember. If there is anything I can truthfully and honestly do to help you in your healing, I am eager to support you.

With deep regret,
Brett

Non-dual Awareness

It seems to be generally true that when we become enlightened about something the experience is not so much about seeing something we haven’t seen before as it is seeing something we have always seen but with new eyes.  We see from a new perspective.  The thing was always there but our way of relating to it has shifted in a manner that allows us to see it as somehow more real.

I have long heard of this thing called “non-dual awareness.”  It is sometimes spoken of as a sudden revelation and I get that such mystical experiences can be dramatically life changing.  But I have come to see an awareness of the non-duality, the not “two in opposition to each other” of the nature of all things as something we can appropriate into our awareness bit by bit.

Let me say this another way.  There is a perspective which is available to us and by which we can make meaning of the diversity and complexity of reality that is not dependent upon the binary constructions of up and down, on and off, in and out, left and right, Republican and Democrat.  This perspective holds that everything is a part of a complex adaptive system. Or to be a bit more precise, that everything is chaos but that we can tease meaning out of it by seeing it as a system in which the interaction of the objects and forces in the system give rise to newness when we relate to it in certain creative ways.

I don’t really expect the prior paragraph to make sense.  It does to me, but there is so much there to unpack and I am not at all sure that I am saying things in the best way.  So I envision this as the first of a series of posts about this perspective.  I want to try to describe a different way of seeing the events and issues of our day from this point of view.  It will not be strange to you as you see the same things I do.  But it may give you a different way of seeing what has always been there.  And it is my hope that this way of seeing allows for new and creative ways of being.

The Essential Difference between Roy Moore and Al Franken

On the surface Al Franken and Roy Moore have a lot in common. Both are white men. Both are politicians who have recently been accused of sexual assault. Indeed, both may soon appear before the same Senate Ethics Committee.

But they are different in a way that may be difficult to see because of other superficial differences. Some may say the difference is that Moore is from the South and Franken from the North. Or that they are from different parties, or that one is a pedophile and the other is not. Or that one admits his offences and the other does not. These are not trivial differences but they are not the essential one that I hope we can more and more as a society come to see and to appreciate.

I share some important attributes with them. I am also a straight white property owning male who enjoys good health and a comfortable life. While I am not a politician I have some social status that I enjoy and wish to protect. I am pretty sure that the essential distinction that differentiates them would be one that would be invisible to me were it not for my association with Brothers in Change.

In the late 1970’s I became aware of an organization in St. Louis that was doing some fascinating work around the issues facing men and how we are shaped by our culture. It grew out of a national conference on Men and Masculinity held in St. Louis a couple years earlier. The community of men that had produced the conference determined to continue the work they had started.

I was quite powerfully drawn to this community of men. I was in a fraternity in college that gave me a sense of community but with it an identity that I wore like an ill-fitting suit. Brothers in Change was a group of men I admired doing work I found valuable. They hosted a film series on sexual politics followed by discussion. A cadre of the men volunteered to do childcare for local women’s events. They examined men’s use of pornography and they tried to understand the root causes of men’s violence against women. And they offered a very comprehensive training program for men who wanted to join the effort. It required attending a 40-hour training in a small group which extended over several weekends. I signed up.

The training process included reading articles and viewing films and discussing the implications of this material on our personal lives. We were expected to talk about our feelings. I had never been in a community of men which had this level of self-examination and self-disclosure. Among the many benefits of completing the training, the most visible was that it allowed one to join the volunteer staff of the organization.

But completing the training was not just about warming the seat for 40 hours. There was something else that was required of us…and this is the core point to my story. In order to complete the training and join the staff we each had to acknowledge our own abuse. Not the abuse done to us. The abuse we do to others, especially to women.

Most of the men had not done things that could be considered criminal abuse, though some had. But all of us were privileged by our education and our class but especially by our sex. Whether or not we had personally used physical violence in a relationship with a women, we all benefited by the presence of domestic violence. We were all, in some sense, the perpetrators of abuse.

In the years since my participation with that progressive fraternity I have come to see some things a bit differently. We were then more attentive to maleness as a source of oppression than we were to whiteness. But the question of what constitutes abuse has remained central for me.

I went on to work as a psychotherapist with offenders in the fields of sexual abuse and domestic violence intervention. The question of what we mean by abuse is quite crucial to helping men and women change how we construct our most primary of relationships. Even today there is not a clear consensus of what that word means.

Words are tools and the tool you select is tailored to the task at hand. If the task is to determine whether the state has the right to intervene in a family or to arrest someone because of their behavior, you will chose a different meaning than if you are trying to support development of healthy relationships. For the purposes of my work, we looked for a way to name what we do when we are harming others, the relationship, and even ourselves.

When we use the power we have over another to satisfy our own desires at the expense of another we are committing “abuse.”

I sometimes get disagreement from my colleagues about this definition so I don’t want to imply that it is accepted in the field. The major problem most people have with this way of understanding abuse is that it fails to differentiate between abusers and non-abusers. We very much want to believe that there are good people and bad people… and we are the good people.

Those of us who have clarity about our own behavior know we act in ways that use our power over others to satisfy some wish we have and in the process do harm. I never understood child abuse until I had children.

So the difference between Roy Moore and Al Franken is not that Al knows what he did and Roy does not. It is not that one is an abuser and the other is not. None of us is “an abuser.” We are all people who are capable of abuse. There are no bad people. But all people are capable of bad action. “All sin and fall short…”

No, the crucial, the essential difference is in how Mr. Moore and Mr. Franken see themselves. Roy insists he is incapable of bad action. Al knows he is. And in that is all the difference. Roy has nothing to atone for and thus nothing to fix. Al is now and for some time has been working to address the injustices that befall the victims of abuse… criminal abuse. He knows his feet are made of clay.

The list of powerful men who have sexually abused women grows longer each day and we wonder if there are any men who don’t belong on it. If we are honest with ourselves, we all do. Not that we all have women in our lives who will rise to publicly confront us. But we have all used the power that we have as men, and that certainly includes sexual power, to satisfy our desires and, in the process done harm to women. The essential difference is that some of us know that and some of us don’t.

How Resilience Works

Source: How Resilience Works

We all know that resilience is a good thing.  But we are not very clear about what makes for a resilient person or organization.  We need pockets and sources of resilience to best respond to the increasing chaos in the world we live in.  This article gives good guidance for knowing what we need in our toolkit to create the quality of resilience.  It is also beautifully written.

Islands of Sanity

One of my tribes is the international community of folks working in the fields of organizational development and conflict resolution.  Margaret Wheatley is a primary source for many of us.  She has a new book coming out in a couple of weeks entitled, Who Do We Choose To Be: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity.  She says about it;

“I know this is the most important book I have written. Writing it in September 2016, I wondered whether readers would accept the descriptions of where we are; but now, the book feels descriptive, even a bit tame, given all that continues to unfold in the world at exponential speed.”

The book won’t be released until June 19 so of course I haven’t read it.  But the excerpts she has released make a couple of things very clear.

  • The problems we are facing in the world are not ones we don’t know how to solve.  We are not waiting for some technological breakthrough that allows us to address and resolve the social and environmental crises we are encountering.  We already know what to do.
  • What we are missing is not technology but leadership.  We can’t implement the solutions because our leaders are people who have come to power because they love having power.  They get power from the existing structures.  They are not willing to change these structures because that will mean a loss of power.
  • The leaders we need are not people who want to be in the positions of power and they are not the people that most will elect to office.  The imagination of the larger culture is not one which can contain the transformation we need.
  • So the global problems can only be addressed by local leadership.  We address them by forming organizations that are in Meg Wheatley’s lexicon, “Islands of Sanity.”

Beginning in July we are forming a gathering we are calling Sacred Soup Sunday.  We are planning to meet on the first and third Sunday evenings of the month.  We will give you details as we work them out.  We long to create for each other Islands of Sanity.

Judeo-Christian Values

In this week”s news magazine “The Week” there is an article about Steve Bannon, the chief strategist for the Trump White House.  The closing paragraph of the article begins

What does Bannon propose doing?

Bannon believes the only viable path forward is to overthrow the political establishment, undo globalization and restrict immigration, and create a new system based on Judeo-Christian values and economic nationalism.

As much as I am troubled by Mr. Bannon’s perspective and agenda, I am even more distressed that it can be so easily characterized as being “based on Judeo-Christian values.”

I don’t doubt for a moment that Mr. Bannon believes that what he believes is informed but the Judeo-Christian tradition.  And I don’t doubt that there are a great many others who, saying they support Judeo-Christian values, would agree with Mr. Bannon.  And, as we now live in a post truth world, that fact that they say it is so makes it so.

But I want to state in the strongest possible terms that the values of the current administration broadly, and those expressed by the “chief strategist” in particular have almost no connection to the values expressed in Hebrew and Christian scripture.

Indeed, the final sentences of that paragraph and of the article read…

Bannon doesn’t shy away from his image as a shadowy figure pulling strings. “Darkness is good,” he says. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.”

Alligators break things

We didn’t elect Donald Trump as our President because we thought he would fix things. We elected him because we knew he would break things. At some point that task will be completed and we will have to start rebuilding. We will have to remove him.

It may take four years when we elect someone else. It may only take until the 2018 elections when we have reconstituted the Congress such that we can impeach him. Or it may come to the awareness of the Republican Party that they cannot allow him to remain in office without doing fatal damage to the party. Indeed, they may have no hope for re-establishing credibility with the American people unless they are willing to protect us from him.

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Each person has the option of choosing to feel better or to better feel. The more mature option is to allow our pain to teach us about what we need and to motivate us to improve our lives. We use the anxiety to bring our attention to an issue and to explore it until we understand how to address it and then fix it and get pleasure from a sense of mastery and the absence of the pain we were in.

But from time to time we are so overwhelmed by the anxiety and have so little hope that we can address it that we say, “screw it,” and just grab a beer or a donut or some porn. Instead of struggling to “better feel” we just do what will make us “feel better.”

That is what we did when we elected Donald Trump. Coal miners in West Virginia didn’t think that Trump would bring back their jobs, but they liked the fact that he was expressing outrage over the loss of them. They just wanted someone to “drain the swamp.” By now it is very clear that he has no intention of draining the swamp. Rather he is importing the alligators.

But these alligators will break the system. They will quickly and effectively make the system so dramatically dysfunctional that we will have to scrap it and start over. It will be beyond repair. At that point we will, as the person who has “acted out,” discover that we have “hit bottom,” in the parlance of addition recovery. We will marshal our resources to the point that we no longer take the easy out and instead do the hard work of rebuilding.

The tasks of rebuilding are not going to be possible in the presence of a corrupt system. By no objective definition of corruption can one argue that Hillary Clinton is more corrupt than Donald Trump. That is going to be even more apparent as soon as he is sworn in [in five days as I write this].

Corruption is when one uses the power one is entrusted with for the benefit of another to benefit oneself instead. Accepting bribes is a prime example. But so is when elected officials use the power of their office in ways that benefit the party over the interests of the people. So, yes, we have a corrupt federal government.

The promise of a Trump Presidency is that it will make the corruption so evident that we cannot ignore it any longer and will finally act to change the system. We will begin to demand that our political parties actually serve the people over their own petty interests. We will actually drain the swamp.

I am quite confident this will happen at some point. We cannot continue to damage our internal organs with our dependency on intoxicants like promises we know cannot be kept and which are ultimately unjust. At some point we will grow up and realize that we each have a responsibility to the all that requires that we pay taxes and care for each other and no longer expect the community to do more for us than we are willing to do for it. That day will come and it will come sooner for the folly that is our election of Donald Trump.

To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This – The New York Times

What if falling in love is not something that happens to you, but something that you create by the choices you make?

Link to source: To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This (Updated With Podcast) – The New York Times

Do we really want to have a greater level of intimacy with others?  Why does intimacy scare us so much? What would happen if we were in a community in which the norm was to have the deepest level of intimacy with each other that we could?