The few, the healthy, the lucky

A “truce” with medicine

A mild stir has ensued from a report that my former church is trying to make some efforts to ward off criticism that its form of spirituality is in conflict with general standards of health care. The NYT story didn’t go the way the PR department at the church had expected. It conveys the image of an organization in the final throes of its own death. The few remaining adherents are getting deeply into old age.

To be a Christian Scientist is to attribute health and healing to right thinking about reality. It includes the belief that there is a universal benign power that creates and inhabits a world of perfection and happiness. It also attributes all imperfection and unhappiness to wrong thinking, or the belief that we live in some other universe. Healing involves aligning “thinking” with the the perfect world. So, ultimately the responsibility for health is on each individual.

One of the most serious consequences of this belief system is the implication that sick people are to blame for their problems. I have seen people with every kind of ailment endure pain, disfigurement and various degrees of impairment because they believed that these problems would go away as soon as their minds clicked into alignment with the belief that everyone is perfectly OK.

As detailed here recently, a fine and spunky member of the family succumbed because: 1) she refused to have a fibroid removed, and 2) because, at her insistence, no one would give her nourishment via some alternative means.

The church can posture as much as it wants about how it is liberalizing its policies, but the fact of the matter is that most of its dwindling membership is seriously senior and their brain pathways are deeply grooved in the old policies. Most of them will judge the church as straying from the true path and will continue to hobble through the rest of their lives hoping they will pass away quietly in the night with little or no discomfort. And a few of them may welcome the excuse to finally get a medical diagnosis or a prescription for a pain killer or antibiotic or whatever they need. Parents have been scared for the past ten or so years because of legal measures that provide severe punishments for failure to provide medical care to children - so they aren't a significant part of the intended audience.

The whole belief system is defined by a book, Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy, which she has deemed perfect and complete and is not subject to revision or updating in light of new facts that may emerge to challenge some of her assumptions. One of the most egregious, for me, is her damningly faint praise for Darwin’s discoveries. She basically says that as far as wrong explanations of the natural world are concerned he is less wrong than most. But still wrong. The world isn’t material, she claims, is not governed by universal physical laws, but is a dream state that is the exact opposite of the true spiritual state, which is totally good and eternal. What I eventually came to realize is that the “spiritual” world is the dream state, while the material one is the one that deserves and needs our attention.

People who take up the Christian Science way of life are idealists who sincerely want a better world, and are appalled that there is so much evil and ugliness in their daily lives. The ones who defend it the most, however, are those who have strong constitutions, good genes and a ton of good luck. Their commitment to advancing the cause of Christian Science allows them to attribute their good fortune to the ideas and techniques taught in Eddy’s book.

However, the aging process moves inexorably along and even the Directors of the church must be feeling it - a recent photo of the five of them is scary. If it weren’t for the attempt to get the public to pay for their religion’s wacky prayer treatments they wouldn’t have bothered to posture as “liberals.” Incidentally, most of the Directors took over the church in 2004 coup because they represented staunch conservatives who thought the religion was being diluted by appeal to an increasingly skeptical public and as well as an increasingly confused and discouraged membership. The effort to get this brand of “right thinking” health care covered by government-paid health insurance is laughable and its rejection is a scrap of evidence that there are still some legislators who can think straight - at least for a few moments at a time.

Time and a bandanna

** NOTE: For the past six or seven years, this blog has been mostly about the "current events" that engage my attention, and so it generally presents public issues. But nowadays I am freer to share some important private issues and changes that have been going on in my thinking the past couple of years. To that end, I present this initial entry:

On August 10 I presented four original songs, singing and playing guitar and keyboards at the “Songwriter’s Café,” an event held a couple times a month at Red House in Walnut Creek. It was a slow night as these things go, according to Peter Avery, the Red House coordinator. They usually have six acts, but only five signed up. And of that a couple didn’t even show up. Ryan, the RH host took the first set and paired me with Walty for the second set of four songs each. Walty is a great guitarist and singer who instantly contributed an excellent guitar solo when I happened to muse while singing that this would be a good spot for a nice guitar solo. He asked, “What key?” I told him “C” and he launched right in. It was so good I had him repeat it. This is the wonderful kind of magic that happens during live music that gives me such special joy. Now that this “debut” is over, and I didn’t get de-butted, I hope to become a regular at the Café, which will help me get through my catalog of songs written in the 70s, and may encourage me to write some new ones.

This experience only roughly approximates the public appearances I made over the course of over 30 years as a Christian Scientist, both as a “Reader” in the churches and as a lecturer. The content is decidedly different! So is the audience. In my previous appearances, as well as in over 150 written articles, I’ve only represented that religion, even while trying to rehabilitate its culture with a touch of contemporaneity. This time I'm representing only myself – albeit a self of the 70s. Back then I had considered myself a songwriter and generated a few dozen songs, which were quietly shelved once I became a practitioner and representative of the Christian Science point of view. There’s nothing specifically against artistic expression in that system, but the more public you become – as a practitioner, teacher, writer, lecturer, etc – the more constrained you can feel about displaying emotion, doubt, ambivalence, or anything too "personal." You’re supposed to represent the absolute and fixed verities, which admit of none of that “human” roughness.

I was 36 when I first thought of myself as a Christian Scientist. Since 2005 – and now that I think about it, probably before – I have evolved away from that set of beliefs and have found myself mentally (but certainly not physically!) back to where I might have been if that 30-year detour hadn't happened. I'm creatively alive again, if not entirely free of the kinds of problems that at the time probably induced me to take up a religion that eschewed the kind of world view that would be characterized as “sensual.” For example, the opening line of the first song I performed at Red House went:

Here I sit smoking my last cigarette, it’s been a long, low night and it ain’t over yet.

I don’t smoke anymore, not cigarettes anyway, but I’ve had plenty of long, low nights in the past 30 years. The difference this time is that I'm not ashamed to admit it in public, since I don’t consider myself an example of the kind of idealized human being that is supposed to result from believing in the absolute perfection of the true “spiritual man." Once in a while, when confronted by something scary, I do detect a mental twitch that in the past would have been called “prayer,” a desire to turn to some Agent above and beyond the present challenging situation that could lift me out of trouble. It’s the “skyhook” mentality that Dennett so clearly demolishes in “Breaking the Spell.” I now believe in what he calls, in “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, “cranes,” as opposed to skyhooks – in other words, progress built step by little step, adding to work that has already been done. The way evolution does it.

It’s what led me to my present state – a label for which still eludes me. I am not an “atheist” in the narrow sense of someone who eschews the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god. I eschew all divine agents. So "non-theist" might better characterize me. But that states it negatively. Maybe better would be “naturalistic humanist.” But that sounds overblown. And the term "Bright" seems a bit contrived, although I would align with their description of a person with:

• a naturalistic worldview
• free of supernatural and mystical elements
• ethics and actions based on a naturalistic world view

What I want to make clear is that I am not on some kind of “spiritual quest,” not finding my way back to god by some other “path.” I think of myself as unwrapping possibilities. Yes, self-discovery, but not in the sense of ascending toward an already set identity – especially not one set by a “Creator.” It’s more like just fooling around. For example, I used to love to watch Avner Eisnberg, a clown/mime, standing on a stage with no other prop than a bandanna around his neck. He would just stand there and look around until he eventually found the bandanna and started fooling with it, twisting it into various shapes, stretching, waving, pulling, throwing it and so forth until he was thoroughly occupied with it and had made the most of it. Just fooling around, playing with the possibilities in the here and now – that’s more like what I'm doing these days. My work now represents no one else but me, advances no cause but to unfold the joys of existence. Even then it’s work, and sometimes difficult work – like preparing to get up on stage and singing. It takes a lot of time, and I go through a lot of emotions and tension. But in the end, it’s over and it is what it is and that’s enough.

I heard Steve Shapiro speak once on the subject of “goal-free” living. That’s probably what I am doing these days. I have no goal, lead no movement, pick no fights, and bear only a grudge or two – the pain of which is receding more every day. And yet I feel open to explain to anyone what I am discovering since breaking free of the spell that there is something more than what exists here and now, or what can come into existence by just fooling around with it. This is sufficient. Just give me time and a bandanna, especially time.