Guns, heroism, and a musical lament for the victims of shootings.
Transcript
Several weeks ago, I was walking through the city where the organization I work for has its office; and I was suddenly struck with the observation that, while cities are thought of as the hubs of human life, there was so little at the heart of my city (the downtown area, that is) that resembles the natural world, which is, of course, the source of all life.
This reminded me of the poetry of Kahlil Gibran. In his book, The Prophet, a wise sage - who arrived from the sea and eventually returns to the sea - comes to live among the people of an ancient village, and before he leaves, is asked to speak on a number of topics asked about by the villagers who have gathered for his departure. Here is the bit that came to mind as I was passing through the city that day:
A mason came forth and said, Speak to us of Houses.
And he [the prophet] answered and said:
Build of your imaginings a bower in the wilderness ere you build a house within the city walls.
For even as you have home-comings in your twilight, so has the wanderer in you, the ever distant and alone.
Your house is your larger body.
It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stillness of the night; and it is not dreamless. Does not your house dream? and dreaming, leave the city for a grove or hill-top?
Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow.
Would the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments.
But these things are not yet to be.
In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together. And that fear shall endure a little longer. A little longer shall your city walls separate your hearths from your fields.
The poetry here is saying something about the soul’s need for wilderness, as well as our fear of what is wild and that which we may encounter in times of solitude. Because of that fear, we forget that the Wild is the Origin of Life and the continuous Source of our ongoing lives. And of course, in a perpetuating cycle, the act of cutting ourselves off from the Source of Life - closing ourselves within the city walls, as Gibran puts it - fosters even greater fear as we become unrooted from our Ground of Being.
When I think today about being cut off from the Source of Life, I can’t help but think about the tragic death of innocent children (and their teachers) in Uvalde, not to mention the numerous mass shootings that have occurred in the United States in the two weeks since… and the other cases of death by gun - suicide especially - that have been brought once again to the attention of the American public as the conversation over gun control has reached a fever pitch.
Like so many others, I am angry and despairing over the cutting short of so much human life and the agony being felt by the loved ones who are grieving those who have been killed. Like so many others, I am also dumbstruck by the disconnection (a sense of being cut off) from Life that seems to be evident when any gunman makes the choice to pick up a firearm and end the conscious life of a fellow human being.
Like so many others, I’ve been wondering: “How did we get here, and what do we do now?” Here’s my two cents.
My focus today is the archetype of the Hero. Traditionally, the archetype of the Hero is discussed in relation to the psychology of young men. As a rule, I maintain that archetypal energies understood to be more masculine or more feminine are always accessible to (and a part of) us all, regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, etc. I feel the same way about Hero energy. However, since we are discussing death by gun - and since men are almost exclusively the shooter in gun-related homicides (and the majority of those in recent years have been age 25 or younger), and since men are six to seven times more likely than women to die by gun-related suicide - it doesn’t seem inappropriate to speak directly to the condition of young men in America for today’s episode. So, if I favor he/him pronouns or refer mostly to male figures today, that is why.
For millennia, our culture has glorified the figure of the Hero. The Hero’s story begins when given circumstances call for him to strike out on his own, usually to seek for something of value or to accomplish some critical task. Along the way, he is confronted by trials and receives help from a seasoned elder. Before the journey is over, he has matured significantly, has achieved some degree of self-mastery, and has won a place of honor among his community when he returns victorious.
When looked at archetypally, the Hero, of course, is an expression of masculine energy: aggressive, outward moving, and goal-oriented. As I said before, masculine energy is accessible to all human beings of course (not just those who identify as male), just as feminine energy - which is characterized as receptive, nurturing, and relationship-oriented - is also accessible to all human beings. While most of us tend to favor one side of the spectrum over the other, many wisdom traditions suggest that spiritual and psychological growth and maturity depends on our ability to expand our access to both energies and find balance between the opposites.
Gibran’s exhortation to build bower in the wilderness is indicative of that need for balance. Our American cities are overwhelmingly masculine in quality, driven by corporate economics that prioritize productivity, competition, and material gain. Because of that, our souls need the receptive, nurturing spaces of Nature to feel restored and connected to the living world. Guns, too, are masculine: targeting, uncompromising, and undeniably phallic. It’s no surprise that, in our stories and our places of work, we see the archetypal Hero take the form of the gunslinging do-gooder and the junior executive who comes up with the genius marketing plan that no one else could have thought up.
The Hero has an important place in our society and our personal development; however, we often fail to recognize that the Hero is a depiction of masculine energy that has still yet to reach maturity; it is through the transformational process of the Hero’s Journey that greater maturity comes to be.
That said, we, of course, live in a patriarchal society, which is to say that our culture has an unhealthy imbalance between masculine and feminine energies. Patriarchy gives privilege to men, while mature masculine energy helps to create structures in society through which all people flourish. Patriarchy accepts (and even promotes) violence, while mature masculinity is dedicated to protecting all that is true and good. Patriarchy uses personal differences as a reason to create divisions between people, while mature masculinity recognizes the need for union between the opposites.
The thing that distorts healthy masculine energy into the bizarre, toxic patterns of patriarchy… is fear. It is the fear of the wilderness that keeps us closed up inside the city walls; and also, in another ironic cycle, it is also the fear of not living up to or conforming to the standards and expectations that patriarchy puts forth. This is the same fear that is also at the root of the all-or-nothing attitude that some people have when they defend the Second Amendment.
Like our city walls, the Second Amendment exists for the sake of protecting ourselves from danger that might invade from without. But when we are continuously grieving our brothers and sisters who take their own life, as well as those who are killed while at school or while grocery shopping, we have to ask: “From what are we protecting ourselves?”
Going back to the City as a metaphor, we can see it as a representation for the ego and the egoic demands of society. Psychologically speaking, being closed within the city walls is one way to symbolize a tendency to deny the deeper, wilder parts of the psyche. Here, below the level of daily consciousness, we all have inside us parts of ourselves that are yet unknown, and so they seem strange, unsettling, even dangerous.
Central to the psychology of Carl Jung is the idea that the unconscious content of our psyches, in order to make itself known to consciousness, will project itself out on other people. So what happens when the unknown parts of ourselves seem so foreign and so strange that we have a dangerous sense that they are going to overwhelm us? If we never turn to face our inner other - he or she who dwells in the deep wilds of the psyche - fear will prevail and we will eventually project our own ‘otherness’ onto other people who may then seem overwhelmingly threatening. This, I would argue, is the psychological underpinning to the concept of “replacement theory” that motivated the mass shooting in Buffalo.
But the ancient wisdom in our stories tells us that there is a process by which this dilemma might be avoided. This is the function of the archetypal Hero. When we have access to the healthy energy of the Hero, we do not cast out those we see as ‘other’; instead, we ourselves cast off… leaving home and our community so that we become the ‘other’. The Hero’s Journey may take the form of actual physical travel, but truly it is an inner journey into the wild, yet unknown realms of our own souls. This is how we come to learn what we are truly made of; and when we finally face the ‘otherness’ within ourselves, it is then that we can more clearly see ourselves in others, evoking compassion and caring, instead of fear and violence.
Indeed, the hero’s relationship to fear is altogether different than the fear of the wilderness that fosters the oppressive patterns of patriarchy. When truly answering the call to embark on the Journey, the Hero neither hides from fear nor tries to subdue it. In fact, it is the presence of fear that lets us know we are headed in the right direction, because we have been taught that the moment we face our fear is the moment we gain access to our greatest power; it is actually that power, that calling, and the sense of individual responsibility that comes with it, that is likely what we fear the most.
I say that “we have been taught,” because although the Hero’s Journey is something we must ultimately undergo alone, elders have always played a critical role in the rites of passage that bear the energetic qualities of the Hero’s Journey. Part of the crisis we are experiencing now is we have lost the cultural containers that once held this sacred process - a process that our souls are still hardwired to experience.
Elders and the keepers of ancestral wisdom are those who have always helped us to understand - through the symbolic and cosmological meanings found in the old stories - the deeper, darker regions of our own psyches where we might find the more wild nature of humankind but also the power and knowledge necessary for taking hold of our life’s purpose.
But alas, just as we have lost touch with nature, we have also let go of the rites of passage that would provide the container for young people to take such a journey; instead, they have been replaced by standardized tests and other exercises meant to meet the demands of the ivory tower, which has also been motivated by fear; and the well-meaning would-be Elders (which are all of us) imagine that our hands are tied, and that we would be doing our young people a disservice if we allow them to blow of their homework for the sake of running off into the woods to daydream.
We’re talking about school now, the institution that we expect will initiate our young people into adulthood. However, the structures of school are modeled on the same problematic patterns of our economy, prioritizing productivity, achievement, and the bottom line. Like the disconnect between our city-based economics and Nature as the Source of Life, critics of our public school system point to the breaking of the connection between the child and the family, especially in comparison to pre-industrial America when - instead of the father going off to the factory and the older children going off to school and the mother being left to take care of the home and the younger children by herself - all members of the family worked together to contribute to the family economy.
Compulsory schooling developed, of course, just as assembly line manufacturing was becoming widespread in America (interestingly enough, the firearms industry was one of the first to use the assembly line). Of the motivations driving the push for compulsory education, two are critical to our discussion today: the first was to prepare young people to serve the manufacturing economy… hence the bells, standards, and grade levels; the second was a growing demand for conformity to American ideals due to… wait for it… a fear of immigrants.
Having served as a public school teacher for eleven years, I’ll be the first to say that wonderful things happen in school between caring teachers and their students. But, when it comes to the structure of our schools, the child’s connection with nature, with the family, and with the personal soul are an afterthought, if considered at all. Instead of offering a container in which a proper Hero’s Journey might take shape, our schools give young people a battery of standardized exercises and tests which are more or less meant to prepare them for life in the economy that will give them more of the same imbalance.
It may sound like I am finding fault in those who work in our schools. Quite to the contrary, I have every bit of respect and compassion for those who show up everyday and care about and care for our young people. Teachers who hear this episode will know what I am talking about…
So, what happens when we are deprived of the Hero’s Journey that our souls are hardwired to experience?
In an effort to catalyze this important coming-of-age, the energy of the Hero can take hold of us in any number of neurotic ways. Combine that with the fact that, through video games, movies, social media, marketing, and socialization, we have glorified the use of guns as a way of defeating those who we see as a threat - intruders, thieves, and criminals. As though possessed with a twisted shadowy version of the Hero, many of the gunmen we are hearing about seem to have a delusional sense that the act (or acts) of violence they carry out are actually heroic! On the flip side, the externalized violence we see in tragedies like Uvalde might instead be turned inward on a young person who has yet to integrate the deeper wilder parts of the soul, and suicide seems like the only way to resolve the pain.
All this brings me to another, more challenging passage of The Prophet by Griban. Here it is:
Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.
And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,
So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all.
Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self.
You are the way and the wayfarers.
And when one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone.
Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.
You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked;
For they stand together before the face of the sun even as the black thread and the white are woven together.
And when the black thread breaks the weaver shall look into the whole cloth, and he shall examine the loom also.
I want to be clear about something, because anyone who knows this poetry may know that the next few lines explain how he who has been wronged is not totally unaccountable for the wrong-doing. This could easily be misconstrued for some kind of “blaming-the-victim” discourse. But, Gibran was a mystic, and in those next few lines, he is using a somewhat provocative choice of words to convey the foundational idea that, anything that we might find in another is also somewhere in ourselves. In fact, according to the psychology of Carl Jung, it is by observing what we find distasteful in others that we can most easily discern those parts of ourselves that we have exiled from consciousness.
By using this passage, I’m not suggesting that innocent children are in any way accountable for their own tragic deaths. Nor am I pointing the finger at teachers, or parents, or business owners, or assembly line workers, or anyone in particular. Nor am I excusing the actions of anyone who chooses to rob another person of their right to life. What I’m trying to do is look at the loom… the systems in which we all participate, and how they might be contributing to what appears more and more to be a systemic problem.
I’m encouraged by the conversations that are happening around gun control… but we have to be careful not be swept up in the same type of shadow projection we’ve been discussing here by viewing those with whom we debate as the terrifying other whom we’ve yet to encounter in our own selves… and then wind up shooting insults at them instead of bullets.
I’ll offer myself as an example. I consider myself pretty anti-gun. In the midst of all that has been going on in the world, my older son has become very interested in gunplay. At first, I wanted to push back, but I also didn’t want his interests to be so taboo that they were forced to become a secret obsession. It may come as no surprise that, when I took a quiet moment to examine my own heart on the matter, I remembered a small quiet part of myself that is actually somewhat fascinated with guns, as well as being terrified by them.
After I found that place, I could have conversations with my son about what he found interesting about his gunplay… and his interest was most in the gadgets and accessories he could invent to accompany his imaginary weapon. The weapon itself is a symbol of power, agency, and responsibility… all things I want in healthy measure for my sons.
The MeadowSong podcast is about healing and transformation, and so at the end of this essay, I’m asking myself where it is that we can find the medicine.
Perhaps it’s obvious by this point. The medicine is found in the wilderness of our individual souls. Hence the ambivalent title of this episode, “Aiming at the Inner Other”, which is to say that at least part of the answer to the problem of aiming guns at people who we see as ‘other’ lies in our choice to make finding our own inner other our aim in life. Systems only change when enough individuals change to tip the scales. Acts of private Heroism carried out by individuals - a critical mass of teachers, parents, politicians, etc. - courageous enough to face their own shadow and embrace the wild and the feminine within them… that is what Gibran is telling us is needed to remove the stumbling block for those who will follow after us.
So where are the elders who today might hold space for our inner journeying? Of course, we can still find them in our stories, as well as our historic figures: they are Gandalf, Dumbledore, Obi-Wan, King Aurthor, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, MLK, Gandhi, (these last three each happen to have been killed by a gunman) and given a reading that is independent from religiously-inspired divisiveness, they are Jesus, Muhammod, and the Buddha. Of course, the Elders are also alive in our society today. They are the poets, teachers, parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, business professionals, public figures, therapists, and volunteers… and anyone working directly or indirectly to bring young people into a life of greater wisdom and deeper relationship with themselves and their community.
When we make the inner journey, we contribute to the rebalancing of society; and it is how we will integrate the wisdom, responsibility, and maturity needed to make important decisions about gun policy, as well as to teach our young people about the courage needed to honor themselves and others.