Legalized gay marriage is inevitable; the polls over the years demonstrate increasing acceptance. Those who oppose gay marriage, for whatever reason, should reconsider their stance; they should realize that one cannot stop a wave with sticks and stones. Gay marriage is not a tsunami; it brings no destruction, only an increase of justice, in its wake. Those who oppose it should stop disguising their discomfort behind dogmas, prejudice and ignorance, much as those who opposed racial equality did during the 1960s. We should, in contrast, pass legislation legalizing gay unions as soon as possible, so we can get on with the crucial tasks of addressing the serious problems our nation is facing.
One of the chief areas of opposition concerns the name: marriage. There are many who support full legal rights for gay unions but believe that the term "marriage" should be reserved for the legal union of one man with one woman. In one of the last polls taken, 57% of Americans support full legal status for gay unions; a majority, however, still opposes that they should be called marriages. There are many very decent people who believe this, especially among older individuals. Bridging the gap between acceptance and terminology, however, need not be difficult. This little article is written to help reduce that gap to an insignificant crack.
What's in a name? Apparently, plenty. I propose the coinage of a new name, almost identical to the word "marriage" to define gay unions. Legislation could be passed quicker using this term; those believing that the word "marriage" should be restricted to heterosexual couples would have no objection to the new term. If society, at a later date, should decide that the distinction need no longer exist, subsequent legislation could be passed using the term "marriage" for the unions of both heterosexual and homosexual couples.
At first I thought to combine "gay" and "marriage," but the term "gmarriage" is very unwieldy. I subsequently coined what I think to be a much better term. The German word for "gay" is "schwul;" take the "s" from this and add it to "marriage" and presto! a quite usable word emerges: smarriage. May I smarry you? Love and Smarriage. Let me not to the smarriage of two minds admit impediments. All right, it might sound a little comical at first, but it is euphonious and could serve a very useful function, albeit a temporary one. The term "civil union" is far too abstract and bureaucratic; gays are right to demand more as a designation of a loving relationship. "Smarriage?"--Why not?
Perhaps, at first, smarriage rights might differ slightly--but only very slightly--from marriage rights. This would placate those who need to see a differentiation between them. Just as we are unlikely to get a perfect health-care law, we might, for political reasons, have to settle for a slightly less than equivalent smarriage law. It could easily be amended later as opposition decreases. I encourage all those involved, however peripherally, with this important civil rights issue to start spreading the word, in this case a very specific word. It might just help to get the right thing done more quickly. There is enough suffering in the world already; we must not be complacent.
I am in the demographic age group most opposed to legalizing gay marriage, namely, males over sixty. I am also religious, which makes opposition to gay marriage even more likely. But my conscience will not allow it, for, I think, some very good reasons. And just what are those, you may ask. I shall now answer. Simone Weil wrote that to love one's neighbor as oneself must include loving (respecting) one's neighbor's desire, that is, the neighbor who has different desires and is thus different from ourselves, providing that desire does no harm. It is not enough to love neighbors who look like us and share our views! Does gay marriage cause harm? Love and do what you want, wrote Augustine. (His definition of love, of course, means a deep, responsible love that might begin with two individuals but is not to stop there, extending further and further to eventually include the whole world.) Genuine love between homosexuals is undeniable; if you doubt it, learn about the Aids Quilt Project. I am convinced that it is religiously and morally wrong for society to hinder loving relationships. Gay marriage will thus strengthen, not weaken, the institution of marriage. As a religious person, I know that God is more interested in the love between two individuals than in the plumbing of their bodies.
Hope to see you at somebody's smarriage some day--soon.
1.26.2010
A Review of "In My Brother's Shadow" ("Am Beispiel meines Bruders") by Uwe Timm
Elie Wiesel wrote of two great misfortunes of the past century. One was to be born into a family of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust; the other one was being born into a family of perpetrators. "In My Brother's Shadow," a deeply moving portrait by Uwe Timm of his family's collaboration with the Nazis, belongs to the latter category. To get a fuller picture of that terrible time; to get at the root of how so-called normal people can collaborate with evil and to use the insight gained to help prevent future nightmares, we need to read about those who abetted the Nazis as well as those who suffered at their hands. We are fortunate that Timm wrote this book; it is essential reading.
Timm aimed for something big with this little book, and I believe he mostly succeeded. On one level it is a portrait, stripped to essentials, of his problematic family. On another level, the family is meant to be symbolic of so many other German families of the time, many members of which descended into evil without even being aware of it.
It is the story of a rather unhappy, dysfunctionally functional family. The father, an intelligent and ambitious man, was never able to realize his gifts. He could have been a lawyer, Timm tells us, but did not study at a university, presumably from lack of means. He is seething with anger for which he has no outlet. He considers himself a failure. He winds up being a furrier, a mediocre one at that--an occupation which he hates. As with many frustrated fathers, he expects his elder son, eighteen years older than Uwe, to succeed where he has failed. The father desperately wanted to consider himself and his son elite; perhaps that is why his son voluntarily joins, while still in his teens, the so-called elite SS Death Head Division.
The book contains excerpts from the elder brother's laconic diary which he maintained while fighting in Russia. It is highly probable that he was involved in, or at least witnessed, atrocities committed against civilians. The diary ends with his stating that it makes no sense to keep a diary when such horrible things occur. Just what those horrible things were he never mentions.
The father, who never joined the Nazi Party, and the son, quiet, respectful, never utters anything in the diary against the Jews, although he must have been indoctrinated frequently, nevertheless fight without any scruples for the Nazi cause.
(The father fought in the air force.)
This is the horror of the book: if it hadn't been for Hitler, Timm's family would have led "normal" lives--they would have been "upright" citizens, no doubt about it. Their unhappiness and difficulties would not have been that different from those of an unhappy family living in, say, New Jersey. Their elder son, who died on the Russian front in 1943 at the age of twenty-one, might have indeed have been able to distinguish himself in life.
This is a very moral book, but an aesthetically successful one, too: the author never preaches. Timm's purpose is not only to objectively portray the past but to analyze the reasons of his family's moral failure in order to understand and prevent others from sliding into evil. His witnessing is an important complement to the witnessing of the victims.
From Timm's portrait it is fairly clear how this "normal" family failed, and, by extension, how many Germans failed. I think the main failures can be summarized as follows:
1. Lack of Self-Awareness. Thoreau's dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living applies here perfectly. The seething anger behind the father's reticence and authoritarian behavior is never diffused by self-reflection. His thwarted and unexpressed sense of failure sets the stage for his son's fateful decision to join the Nazis.
2. Lack of Genuine Transcendence. The father's life, as he sees it, is meaningless. His chief response to the disorder of his inner life is to make a fetish out of order. The highest example of this is, for him, national order; it is never questioned. The mother never questions the father's authority, even though she might have come up with better solutions. Thus, this lack of genuine transcendence links directly to self-absorption and lack of moral and political engagement. Timm, an expert in saying much with little, recounts how the father emphasized the first syllable of "The German Empire"--as if it were God! To follow orders blindly was for Timm's father an ideal; it later became a poor excuse for him and so many others.
These and other reasons for the German failure to confront fascism have been portrayed elsewhere; Timm gives them faces--And the faces just might not be very different from ours. To show us why the descent into evil is not inevitable is the purpose of this wonderful, horrible, cautionary memoir.
This book is, I believe, a postmodern classic. The ambiguity of evil; ordinary people doing monstrous things. Hating these Germans is not possible; they are too much like ourselves. Uwe Timm has risen about his past by a process of examination of his family and of his country. He is a politically engaged, successful author, who, presumably, is not plagued with a sense of failure. He gives us hope. But how many of us have the time, talent and inclination to examine ourselves? One can always begin by reading this book.
Timm aimed for something big with this little book, and I believe he mostly succeeded. On one level it is a portrait, stripped to essentials, of his problematic family. On another level, the family is meant to be symbolic of so many other German families of the time, many members of which descended into evil without even being aware of it.
It is the story of a rather unhappy, dysfunctionally functional family. The father, an intelligent and ambitious man, was never able to realize his gifts. He could have been a lawyer, Timm tells us, but did not study at a university, presumably from lack of means. He is seething with anger for which he has no outlet. He considers himself a failure. He winds up being a furrier, a mediocre one at that--an occupation which he hates. As with many frustrated fathers, he expects his elder son, eighteen years older than Uwe, to succeed where he has failed. The father desperately wanted to consider himself and his son elite; perhaps that is why his son voluntarily joins, while still in his teens, the so-called elite SS Death Head Division.
The book contains excerpts from the elder brother's laconic diary which he maintained while fighting in Russia. It is highly probable that he was involved in, or at least witnessed, atrocities committed against civilians. The diary ends with his stating that it makes no sense to keep a diary when such horrible things occur. Just what those horrible things were he never mentions.
The father, who never joined the Nazi Party, and the son, quiet, respectful, never utters anything in the diary against the Jews, although he must have been indoctrinated frequently, nevertheless fight without any scruples for the Nazi cause.
(The father fought in the air force.)
This is the horror of the book: if it hadn't been for Hitler, Timm's family would have led "normal" lives--they would have been "upright" citizens, no doubt about it. Their unhappiness and difficulties would not have been that different from those of an unhappy family living in, say, New Jersey. Their elder son, who died on the Russian front in 1943 at the age of twenty-one, might have indeed have been able to distinguish himself in life.
This is a very moral book, but an aesthetically successful one, too: the author never preaches. Timm's purpose is not only to objectively portray the past but to analyze the reasons of his family's moral failure in order to understand and prevent others from sliding into evil. His witnessing is an important complement to the witnessing of the victims.
From Timm's portrait it is fairly clear how this "normal" family failed, and, by extension, how many Germans failed. I think the main failures can be summarized as follows:
1. Lack of Self-Awareness. Thoreau's dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living applies here perfectly. The seething anger behind the father's reticence and authoritarian behavior is never diffused by self-reflection. His thwarted and unexpressed sense of failure sets the stage for his son's fateful decision to join the Nazis.
2. Lack of Genuine Transcendence. The father's life, as he sees it, is meaningless. His chief response to the disorder of his inner life is to make a fetish out of order. The highest example of this is, for him, national order; it is never questioned. The mother never questions the father's authority, even though she might have come up with better solutions. Thus, this lack of genuine transcendence links directly to self-absorption and lack of moral and political engagement. Timm, an expert in saying much with little, recounts how the father emphasized the first syllable of "The German Empire"--as if it were God! To follow orders blindly was for Timm's father an ideal; it later became a poor excuse for him and so many others.
These and other reasons for the German failure to confront fascism have been portrayed elsewhere; Timm gives them faces--And the faces just might not be very different from ours. To show us why the descent into evil is not inevitable is the purpose of this wonderful, horrible, cautionary memoir.
This book is, I believe, a postmodern classic. The ambiguity of evil; ordinary people doing monstrous things. Hating these Germans is not possible; they are too much like ourselves. Uwe Timm has risen about his past by a process of examination of his family and of his country. He is a politically engaged, successful author, who, presumably, is not plagued with a sense of failure. He gives us hope. But how many of us have the time, talent and inclination to examine ourselves? One can always begin by reading this book.
1.13.2010
The Direct Path to God
The direct path to God begins by forgetting Him. Forget the idle debate regarding God's existence. Forget it completely; forget it absolutely. This is the best way to begin.
Every entry onto this path is different; the endpoint of the path, however, is always the same.
One begins the path from where one is at the moment. The topography is a combination of one's surroundings and how one views them.
The path is one. It is neither inner nor outer. The path is one.
There are no absolutely correct concepts. There is, however, an absolutely correct path.
Although the starting points are different, the path is the same for the Hottentot and for the secular humanist; the same for the Kabbalist and for the Keralite; the same for the fundamentalist and for the atheist.
Just as physical exercise trims the belly, walking on this path trims the self. This process is what the Greeks called kenosis, self-emptying. Don't worry, there will always be enough self left for what is needed.
We tend to forget that the truths of science are not absolute. It is always possible, even likely, that a new scientific paradigm will replace or significantly modify an older one; our science is also limited by the way our brains have been constructed through the process of evolution. Where life has evolved differently--it is certainly reasonable to assume that the universe, not to mention universes, contain other examples of conscious life besides ours--life will be viewed differently.
If there is or was a Euclid in a very different universe, you can be sure that his mathematical propositions would be very different from the ones we know.
Common sense, for which the measurement of time and space is an absolute, has been proven wrong.
All dogmas are, of course, metaphors. This truth, however, intensifies their meanings; it does not negate them.
Their target, our endpoint, is Silence, not facts.
You have heard of this path before; at your best you have walked on it already. (Two messages from a bird just above it: you have no reason to worry. And you have not done enough.)
It is the single salutary path we have: it is the path of Wisdom and Love.
It is necessary to walk on it, however difficult it may be to move forward. It is not necessary, sometimes even quite detrimental, to talk about it.
Does the Path of Wisdom and Love sound like a cliche? What is a cliche? A cliche is a truth debased by the mouths of those who do not practice it.
Sometimes you might wander off the path and believe that you are still on it. At other times you might be on the path and believe that you are lost. With diligence you will eventually realize exactly where you are.
If you like, call it by a different name. The Sanskrit terms bhakthi (devotion) and jnana (wisdom) will do nicely. No matter what you call it, walk on.
Wisdom is the knowledge of the interconnectedness of everyone and everything; it is true wisdom when it has entered one's marrow. Without love, wisdom can be dry.
Love-well, if you're human, there's no reason to define this! Without wisdom, however, love can be blind.
The most important love is the love for fellow human beings. But this must not be done in exclusion to other important loves. Care for nature in all her diversity is also very important. A positive relation to one's work--which should somehow help others--is also essential. And one should not neglect the love of art--At its best, art is a trustworthy guide. Bach is not a diversion.
If love and wisdom are only feelings, you will not move. If they enable you to take a step, however small, rejoice--You have moved on.
Rejoice! The combination of love and wisdom will take you far.
One way of thinking too much of yourself is by thinking too much of yourself. It is a great burden. The other way of thinking too much of yourself is by thinking too little of yourself. This, too, is a great burden. The path is the sole way to leave burdens behind.
The contemplation of wisdom increases love. The action of love increases wisdom. As you move on, you will learn something amazing: they are one and the same.
Are you somehow crippled and cannot begin? He or she abused me. He or she abuses me. The ardor of the journey will silence such idle complaints. The progress you will make will transcend them.
You still cannot walk? Get yourself crutches. You have no legs? Allow friends to convey you. You have no friends? You have at least one. (It is not God, it is not you.) This one friend will do.
Once you begin--and keep walking--you will eventually see a peak above a dark forest. You may never reach it, but you will see it. Even if it becomes covered by clouds or by gnarled trees on the path; even if you can't see it, you will still see it. Even if you are in a very rough section of the path--there will be many; even if you have reached the dark forest which obscures everything; as you walk on, never forget that appearances are sometimes quite wrong: you are getting closer.
An important part of making progress on this path is helping those who are behind you and accepting help from those who are ahead.
If not now, when?
You've begun? Good. Time now to address those questions.
Why do we suffer? Farther along
Where is God? We'll know all about it
No answer? Farther along,
You will understand why!
We will understand why.
Every entry onto this path is different; the endpoint of the path, however, is always the same.
One begins the path from where one is at the moment. The topography is a combination of one's surroundings and how one views them.
The path is one. It is neither inner nor outer. The path is one.
There are no absolutely correct concepts. There is, however, an absolutely correct path.
Although the starting points are different, the path is the same for the Hottentot and for the secular humanist; the same for the Kabbalist and for the Keralite; the same for the fundamentalist and for the atheist.
Just as physical exercise trims the belly, walking on this path trims the self. This process is what the Greeks called kenosis, self-emptying. Don't worry, there will always be enough self left for what is needed.
We tend to forget that the truths of science are not absolute. It is always possible, even likely, that a new scientific paradigm will replace or significantly modify an older one; our science is also limited by the way our brains have been constructed through the process of evolution. Where life has evolved differently--it is certainly reasonable to assume that the universe, not to mention universes, contain other examples of conscious life besides ours--life will be viewed differently.
If there is or was a Euclid in a very different universe, you can be sure that his mathematical propositions would be very different from the ones we know.
Common sense, for which the measurement of time and space is an absolute, has been proven wrong.
All dogmas are, of course, metaphors. This truth, however, intensifies their meanings; it does not negate them.
Their target, our endpoint, is Silence, not facts.
You have heard of this path before; at your best you have walked on it already. (Two messages from a bird just above it: you have no reason to worry. And you have not done enough.)
It is the single salutary path we have: it is the path of Wisdom and Love.
It is necessary to walk on it, however difficult it may be to move forward. It is not necessary, sometimes even quite detrimental, to talk about it.
Does the Path of Wisdom and Love sound like a cliche? What is a cliche? A cliche is a truth debased by the mouths of those who do not practice it.
Sometimes you might wander off the path and believe that you are still on it. At other times you might be on the path and believe that you are lost. With diligence you will eventually realize exactly where you are.
If you like, call it by a different name. The Sanskrit terms bhakthi (devotion) and jnana (wisdom) will do nicely. No matter what you call it, walk on.
Wisdom is the knowledge of the interconnectedness of everyone and everything; it is true wisdom when it has entered one's marrow. Without love, wisdom can be dry.
Love-well, if you're human, there's no reason to define this! Without wisdom, however, love can be blind.
The most important love is the love for fellow human beings. But this must not be done in exclusion to other important loves. Care for nature in all her diversity is also very important. A positive relation to one's work--which should somehow help others--is also essential. And one should not neglect the love of art--At its best, art is a trustworthy guide. Bach is not a diversion.
If love and wisdom are only feelings, you will not move. If they enable you to take a step, however small, rejoice--You have moved on.
Rejoice! The combination of love and wisdom will take you far.
One way of thinking too much of yourself is by thinking too much of yourself. It is a great burden. The other way of thinking too much of yourself is by thinking too little of yourself. This, too, is a great burden. The path is the sole way to leave burdens behind.
The contemplation of wisdom increases love. The action of love increases wisdom. As you move on, you will learn something amazing: they are one and the same.
Are you somehow crippled and cannot begin? He or she abused me. He or she abuses me. The ardor of the journey will silence such idle complaints. The progress you will make will transcend them.
You still cannot walk? Get yourself crutches. You have no legs? Allow friends to convey you. You have no friends? You have at least one. (It is not God, it is not you.) This one friend will do.
Once you begin--and keep walking--you will eventually see a peak above a dark forest. You may never reach it, but you will see it. Even if it becomes covered by clouds or by gnarled trees on the path; even if you can't see it, you will still see it. Even if you are in a very rough section of the path--there will be many; even if you have reached the dark forest which obscures everything; as you walk on, never forget that appearances are sometimes quite wrong: you are getting closer.
An important part of making progress on this path is helping those who are behind you and accepting help from those who are ahead.
If not now, when?
You've begun? Good. Time now to address those questions.
Why do we suffer? Farther along
Where is God? We'll know all about it
No answer? Farther along,
You will understand why!
We will understand why.
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