“Assisting in Our Own Victimization” Dr. Roger Ray August 11, 2024
One of the oldest pieces of wisdom literature in the world, is a piece of philosophy written in poetry. It is the central portion of the Hebrew Bible’s book of Job. I say the “central portion” because, like a lot of ancient texts, it has gone through a lot of editing over the centuries with very inferior minds trying to force Job to make more sense by giving it a context and a conclusion that just makes the whole thing ridiculous. Ignore the first two chapters about a truly blasphemous wager made between God and Satan and the multiple added endings of the book that offer absurd fixes to the discomfort created by the original work which asks the time-honored question, “Why is there undeserved suffering in the world?” and answers that profound question, forty chapters later, saying, “There is no reason. It just is.”
A lot of religious people try to take the sting out of suffering by insisting that it is God’s will, and God has a plan. I don’t think this is ever very helpful but to those of us of a more panentheist world view, God is not a person who makes plans or has a specific will, nor does God prefer baseball to hockey, or fried chicken over sushi. The universe is God and, in case you have not noticed, the universe is quite capricious. Sure, the universe follows what we call the laws of physics but given the infinite number of variables involved, it turns out to be rather capricious, as we experience it, but we can be reassured that the universe is never malicious.
This is important to understand. The universe can seem to be quite random but assigning it intent, like you are being specifically blessed or cursed is a very primitive anthropomorphizing of the universe which is, I am afraid to say, almost certainly not true. The universe has no malice of intent and, sadly, it also has no benevolence. It simply is. Meaning, direction, purpose, those are both human invention and, I insist, human responsibility. We bring structure to the chaos by our intent, our decisions, our plans.
The universe is not malicious but people sure can be very malicious. The universe just is, it goes its merry way sometimes dropping undeserved golden apples into the paths of some and spreading disease and heartbreak to others without rhyme or reason. The universe does not seek to bless you or to curse you, that’s all in your interpretation. However, as in most religious trivialities, there is a kernel of truth in the saying that everything happens for a reason, it’s just that it isn’t a divine reason, a lot of suffer comes your way for the simple reason that you have made horrible and irresponsible decisions.
Job’s suffering is portrayed as being the capricious sort. His three friends who come to console him and also correct him, insisting that everything happens for a reason, that God has a plan, that Job had either done something to offend God and God is punishing him, or God has a bigger plan and is teaching Job something, but end the end, Job insists that they are all mistaken. His misfortunes, the loss of his fortune, the death of his family members, his own painful illnesses, were capricious occurrences of nature. Neither divine retribution nor bad conduct on his part, and folks, the plain truth of it is that some suffering is just that way.
For many years, the longest running show on Broadway was a kind of modern recasting of Job in the person of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.
Tevye has these brilliant and witty conversations with God. Of course, God remains silent, but Tevye speaks to God about how unfair it is to be a poor Jew at the turn of the century in rural Russia, as the Russian relocation of Jews was beginning.
The play opens with Tevye, forced to pull his ox cart when his horse goes lame, selling milk and cheese to his neighbors. He pauses and says to God, “Isn’t it enough that you give me a life of poverty and bless me with five daughters and no sons, but what do you have against my horse, why must he go lame?”
A lot of Tevye’s suffering was just a result of his context. He was born Jewish in a rural part of Russia that would soon be turning against Jewish people. He lived in fairly pre-modern circumstances that left him working very hard but never able to work his way out of poverty. By pure chance, his wife gave birth to only daughters, giving him no sons with whom to share the labor that kept his family alive.
But we see him suffering from his willingness to adhere to traditions that no longer served his generation. Arranged marriages, Jewish conformity to a crushing economic system, and even accepting racial prejudice against one of his daughters marrying a Russian Orthodox man. Most of what broke his heart was his own unquestioning willingness to be victimized by a set of beliefs that unnecessarily made his life hard and, in many ways broke his heart.
I had to watch my parents struggle to very unsuccessfully pretend to accept their eighth grandchild who was my daughter, adopted from South Korea. The idea was as much of an affront to them as some of Tevye’s daughters’ choices in marriage, and like Tevye, they had no real reason to suffer over her brown skin and almond shaped eyes. In fact, they largely missed out on having a relationship with the smartest, most attractive, funniest, and most successful of all of their grandchildren, and I say that objectively. I can back it up with evidence if needed.
Their racial prejudice was a part of their generation, particularly their generation in rural Kentucky, but most of their peers got over that prejudice years ago. They kept theirs by choice and the ones who suffered the most from their choice was just them. Because, folks, sometimes suffering finds us and sometimes we consciously or unconsciously choose it for ourselves when there are much better options right in front of us.
If you have never read Man’s Search for Meaning, please stop what you are doing and read it. It Was written by the holocaust survivor and founder of logotherapy, Viktor Frankel, who advocated for Americans to balance the Statue of Liberty on our east coast with a Statue of Responsibility on our west coast. Because, he argued, simply being liberated doesn’t equate to a life lived in freedom. This proposed monument you see here is one arm and hand reaching down to grasp another arm and hand, which, I’m glad Frankel didn’t live to see… I think the artist missed the point of this one.
Soren Kierkegaard said something similar a century before Frankel when he quipped, “People clamor for freedom of speech while avoiding freedom of thought.” We are at liberty to say whatever we want, within the confines of the obvious, “don’t shout fire in a crowded theater” sort of limitation.
Social media in all of its forms allows us to spew unfiltered opinions, conspiracy theories, prejudices, and embarrassing nonsense at will but somehow it doesn’t seem to educate, persuade, or satisfy our need to be free, does it?
I certainly understand that a lot of the social progress we have made in the past generation has come from very intentional decisions to be compassionate about the innocent suffering of other people. People with addictions, mental health struggles, people locked into cycles of poverty, and especially people who have been marginalized by social prejudices about race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or disability.
But we have, I think, often failed to do the hard work of thinking about how we may have participated in the times and ways in which we have felt that we were being victimized. Elenore Roosevelt was, perhaps, giving herself some license to exaggerate when she said that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. . . or, that is at least how she is popularly quoted. One of my counseling professors took her exaggeration and carried it a half mile farther down the field and told his students, “No one can really hurt you unless you help them.”
This is an obvious exaggeration, but I think that Liston Mills used to say things like that in class in order to shock us into deeper self-evaluation. If you choose not to feel inferior when someone is trying to talk down to you, it is surprising how often you can resist being manipulated. When someone is trying to humiliate you, make you angry, insult you, choosing not to reward your tormentor with their desired reaction can short circuit abuse.
What Frankel learned in the Nazi death camps was that while they could take your family away from you, they could take your job, your home, your papers, his lifetime of research, they could take even your clothes and shoes, but they could not take away from you how you were going to react to their abuse. Those who gave in and were broken, typically quickly died. Those who resisted, who maintained a sense of their own dignity and worth, despite their circumstances, often were the ones who survived. They couldn’t physically fight back against the Nazis, but they could refuse to accept their view of Jews.
I have often talked with people who felt that they had been terribly abused by their church. One young mother, a nurse, limped into my office one day with bruises on her face and neck, reporting cracked ribs and an injured knee. She was going to have to tell her supervisors at the hospital that she had fallen down a flight of stairs, an explanation she had already used once that year.
She was in a violently abusive marriage, a marriage for which she had broken her vows in a convent, leaving behind her nun’s habit to marry and have children. Her priest told her, scolding her, that this abuse was her cross to bear for having broken her vow to God to be a celibate nun from the age of 18 until she died. As I said in each of our sessions, it was not only her husband that was killing her, it was also the Roman Catholic Church and she needed to leave them both. But she could not leave her husband because she could not imagine leaving her church.
Was she a victim? Yes, she surely was. But, and maybe I shouldn’t say this, but if you ask yourself if she was enabling her victimization, I have to say that she was. That is not to encourage victim blaming. The first criminal in this situation is the violent spouse but close behind him, in my opinion, was the priest who used guilt to trap her in a cycle of violence. I knew this priest well and he was an elderly, poorly educated man who simply didn’t question the religious prejudices he had inherited and which he was passing on; but most of the priests I have known could figure that crap out quickly, he just didn’t choose to. But this nurse also didn’t choose to leave the religion that was so toxic in her life, binding her to a violent man.
You can go down the list of ways in which people are not simply victims, but they are literally coconspirators in their abuse. I spoke at a suicide prevention conference a few years ago and in the Q&A it became apparent that many mothers in the room were very concerned about their young adult gay sons who were contemplating, threatening, or who had attempted suicide. As the conversation continued, I learned that some of them had actually taken their sons to gay conversion programs and many still took their sons to churches that condemned them for being gay.
They were literally putting the gun in their son’s hands while, in their own hearts, living in fear that they might kill themselves. As Kierkegaard lamented, they may exercise freedom of speech, but they just don’t embrace freedom of thought. They could escape a toxic religion that might push their sons to suicide, but they have to be willing to think their way out of the snare of the devil they know. They have liberty but not responsibility. They are free to make their own choices in life but they have not taken the responsibility to make better choices.
Redemption Song is one of the most famous songs recorded by the Jamaican artist, Bob Marley. In it he implores his people who have suffered oppression by colonists, their own government, religion, and a crushing economic system to “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.” It is appropriate for those of us of a spiritual bent to try to understand people who have been unfairly victimized and to show them compassion as well as taking direct action to lessen their suffering.
But Bob Marley is right, none but ourselves can free our minds, and to the extent to which we have been trapped in mental slavery, making us coconspirators in our own abuse, we need to take responsibility for thinking our way out of that.
Strict obedience is not the only way of avoiding religious guilt. Turning our backs on toxic religion is a better way. Working hard, taking on two and three jobs, denying ourselves appropriate rest and reward, is not the only way out of poverty. Sometimes we have to challenge the unfair economic system that creates poverty.
You don’t have to stay in a toxic marriage, or family, or job, or friendship. Your abusers always try to make you believe that you have no other choice but, believe me, you do.
Your government always tries to convince you that they have your best interests at heart, but even after 40 years of trickle down propaganda, it is increasing clear that the government is peeing on us and trying to tell us it is raining. We don’t have to accept an economy that has been rigged to make the rich richer and to keep the poor in too much desperation to ever organize and change the system.
I will have more to say about that in my sermon that will be posted on August 25th, 2024. Until then, keep thinking your way out of mental slavery.
