Resolutions

Same old, I suppose – lose 10 pounds, get back into shape, drink less red wine, simplify. The good news (as it were) is that the first two are, as I write this, attainable; again, depending on one’s definition of ‘shape’. The third? Well, the jury is sufficiently ambivalent (on the respective benefits and costs of same) that I think I’ll just hold that one until the definitive study is done. Also, there is that case of good Australian Shiraz that still sits on the rack. But the fourth. Now we’re talking real resolve. As Nicola and I sat on a blissfully quiet New Year’s Eve at home, and discussed where we’d like to see 2009 be directed, the need to ‘reign in’ was uppermost in both our thoughts. Not just a rewording of the old ‘take more time for ourselves’ mantra – but in the neighbourhood.

A few months back, sitting amongst a group of old friends and acquaintances, I’d begun to muse about the pleasure I was able to take in the ways in which a number of areas in my life had apparently begun to crystallize, particularly in the past year. It would be arrogance indeed to claim that these were ‘goals attained’ – since that would imply some intention in the setting of same. No, these events were more a subtle coalescence of important and very occupying quarters of my life into what could be loosely described as ‘achievement’; reaching a satisfying state that, on reflection, could have been goals if, twenty or more years ago I’d had the wisdom, forethought, and sustainable drive to target them.

I rambled (much as I am now) about the satisfying growth and expansion of an ‘accidental business’ commenced some sixteen years ago. How, without any discernible plan, a small (and decidedly tenuous at the time), private practice had evolved into a twelve-practitioner, two-building ‘enterprise’. How ‘graybeard’ status seemed to have crept up and was, at long last a comfortable mantle in my community of peers. How the opportunity to mentor and spawn a second generation of colleagues had presented. Again, not with any intention (and certainly not desire) to build some professional edifice; but to merely give back to a profession that has been good to me over my working life. And how, with the waxing and waning of many different communities over several years and focuses of interest, a few such have attained gratifying and sustainable prominence in recent times.

And so it was not without some significant surprise that I heard, amongst the litany of well-wishings, a subtext of ‘now what?’; the personal and interpersonal cost attached; and the subtle, incipient seeds of ‘addiction’ being sown. Always ready to relate things to movies, I was reminded of What A Way To Go, a 1960’s comedy with Shirley MacLaine, Dick Van Dyke, and Paul Newman, built around the ‘unintentional’ but fatal success, evidently spawned in any number prospective husbands by Ms. MacLaine’s interest in them; seeing a meteoric rise from small-town contentment to mega-success – and, predictably, one’s being done in by same, shortly thereafter. And so with more than a healthy sprinkling of addictions therapists present in said group, I thought it prudent to at least consider their take on what moments before had been a comfortable riff on being sixty-two and reasonably content at ‘having arrived’.

And so here we are with simplifying. Not such an easy task – when the ‘complications’ in one’s life are, at least on the surface, paying dividends as it were. Perhaps it was the time to actually make a plan – to contain, to build healthy and sustainable boundaries, to be selective, and to be a little less prepared to be seduced by the sweet smell of success. Another abiding metaphor for both Nicola and me is that of gardening: time to prune!

As with any good ‘clean up’, some principles need to be identified and applied. After all, one cannot just go about, randomly clipping and hacking at plants; and expect the result to be anything different than a bad hair cut – shorter hair, but a rather ragged and haphazard ‘look’. And so the task became not just one simplification – which, for me has always smacked of taking things out of an equation in the fond hope that there would be more ‘quality time’ left at the end of the day. But examining one’s commitments, roles, obligations from within the values of intention, reciprocation, boundary-setting as possible parameters directing the decision-making in the upcoming year.

A basic element in mindful living, intention invites a conscious awareness of what one chooses to do – not the harried, reactive, and ill-considered basis that seems inevitably to result in over commitment. Reciprocation, particularly in relationship, be it with individual or community, presupposes a ‘two-wayness’; a sharing with, true – but also a receiving from as a precondition of relations that present as balanced, authentic, satisfying. Too often I find commitments being made where the ‘flow’ is decidedly one-way, ultimately fostering a resentment of time and energy invested. How better to prune, to judiciously assign one’s precious resources than to those mutual attachments. And boundaries, those elusive, often porous limits to our emotional, interpersonal ‘properties’, and their companion principle – saying ‘no’ – consistently applied have simplification written all over the gatepost. With the careful excision of those co-dependent, enabled commitments, one clears the way for healthy growth, the creaking, groaning deadwood kicked to the curb.

And with it all, the opportunity to festina lente – make haste, slowly. No more rushing!

David Howard

Hope (n.)

The theological virtue defined as the desire and search for future good, difficult but not impossible to attain with God’s help.

“To hope” was borrowed from Low German: hoffen- to hop (v.) on the notion of “leaping in expectation”.

Advent is the church season that is pregnant with hope; like the adolescent Mary. Every pregnant woman knows the hope she carries within her body. The first recognizable movement, the leaping baby within, is a beautiful and unforgettable experience. For me, the word hope will relate to the experiential with each recalling of my own (now adult) child’s leaping within me. The unborn child is a mystery. What will this child look like? What will this child grow up to be? What will this child’s future bring? With the growing physical presence of the unborn, each mother desires and prays for the future good for her child, difficult but not impossible to attain with God’s help.

The future of the unborn generations to come, however, is being significantly compromised by those charged with the stewardship of the planet today: you and me. In her commencement address to the 2008 graduating class of Duke University, novelist Barbara Kingsolver challenges them to march forth with hope. She ends her address with a poem written for the class. I trust that Barbara will forgive the reproduction without permission here. For me, Kingsolver – a university-trained biologist and remarkable storyteller (The Poisonwood Bible) - captures the essence of hope. After reading the poem, I invite you to listen to the complete address.

Hope; An Owner’s Manual

Look, you might as well know, this thing
is going to take endless repair: rubber bands,
crazy glue, tapioca, the square of the hypotenuse.
Nineteenth century novels. Heatstrings, sunrise:
all of these are useful. Also, feathers.

To keep it humming, sometimes you have to stand
on an incline, where everything looks possible;
on the line you drew yourself. Or in
the grocery line, making faces at the toddler
secretly, over his mother’s shoulder.

You might have to pop the clutch and run
past all the evidence. Past everyone who is
laughing or praying for you. Definitely you don’t
want to go directly to jail, but still, here you go,
passing time, passing strange. Don’t pass this up.

In the worst of times, you will have to pass it off.
Park it and fly by the seat of your pants. With nothing
in the bank, you’ll still want to take the express.
Tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse that are sleeping
in the shade of your future. Pay at the window.
Pass your hope like a bad cheque.
You still might have enough time. To make a deposit.

http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2008/05/kingsolver._print.ht

Nicola Adair

Communicatio

This week, I received an unusual email from an acquaintance. The gist of the it was that I was asked to send an email to 11 friends as part of a high school religion class project. I was advised that prayer was one of the best gifts that can be received. By simply copying and pasting the prescribed prayer into 11 separate emails, I would be sharing this gift.

My first reaction was: why not send a blind copy bulk email and save all the copying and pasting. That observation was quickly replaced with: why would I do this? I come from a generation that actually handwrote chain letters. I rued the day that I received my first chain letter: the threatening guilt-laden closing sentence still comes to mind. What horrible curse was I to bring on my family and myself by not continuing the chain? I didn’t know twenty people to continue the chain let alone have the wherewithal to bear the cost of postage on my weekly pre-adolescent 1960’s allowance (read: non-existent!). Just thinking about, I wonder if this was not the seed of my neurosis with guilt. Hmmm; I’ll worry about that later. Alright: back to the matter at hand.

After serious contemplation, I responded to the email sender:
Well, I do pray and I hope that my life is a prayer but I don’t use email this way. Almost daily, I receive chain mail style email (prayer and otherwise) that I resent (as in despise; delete). Before photocopiers, folks actually had to write this stuff out and that curtailed the masses. Photocopiers made chain mail easier; email has made it an epidemic. Email prayer: Sorry, no! No copying or pasting; I will pray the specified prayer for 11 souls and trust in the powerful mystery of faith.

The exercise made me stop and think about how I use the internet in my faith journey. I frequent a few sites daily. A Benedictine monk’s daily reflections, an Episcopalian cafe and a spirituality reader are favourites.

The Diocese of Montreal’s excellent weekly lectionary with commentary and links to an incredible Christian art online reference library is a shortcut on my desktop. Incorporated into my lectio divina practice, I have found this site to be very helpful as I leave the lectionary open (well, to be honest-it's on the desktop as an RSS feed) and throughout the day read and reflect on the words and art.

So, what then, do you ask, is my problem with email prayer? Well you may ask. It’s all about me. In the September blog entry “Ora and Labora”, I set out my evolving thoughts on that ‘most elusive Christian concept’, prayer, as Joan Chittester describes it. I won’t bore you with re-iteration; my prayer is about inward communication and personal relationship with Another.

Communication and community seem to originate from the same root word: communicatus; to make common. And for me, therein lies the most potential for this relatively new technology. The St. James’ website was a sleeping creature for a couple of years before David Howard decided to rattle its chains. Slowly and sometimes crumpily, the silent creature is awakening.

Since April 11 2008, we have been encouraging the parish to embrace the critter. Weekly, a bulk email is circulated within the parish roster. Most parishioners don’t reply to the email, but our sense is that they respond. By year’s end, we expect to be well over the 2500 hit mark on our tiny counter seated at the bottom of the homepage. This number is tiny by comparison to the some of the hits I’ve seen on YouTube (where dancing dog home videos may receive over a million hits, go figure). However, the really important part about our number is that it is us: our parish. For a parish with an active roster hovering near the two hundred mark, this is significant.

And a simple, little note each week has been doing the work of communicatio, making common, the life of the parish for the parish.

Another important part of the website has been to communicate the life of the community visually-through the embedded slideshow. I'm convinced that David's ministry is not only psychological but photographic (or maybe I am using this as a rationalization for him to significantly upgrade the current camera equipment), but if we want to really pull people together, electronically, post pictures! The posting of The Amazing Weekend slideshow created a noticeable change in traffic on the website.

This month, the parish website enters a new era. In welcoming the new church year, we have moved to have the homepage reflect the current church season: with the season's liturgical colour and in the weekly lectionary message-through word and image. Perhaps I am doing this just for myself as part of my lectio divina as I contemplate how to electronically present the week's message; if one other person benefits from the exercise that surpasses the expectation.

The internet is a powerful resource for exploration as part of one’s faith journey. The breadth of opinion, the depth of available scholarly reference vehicles and the ease of accessibility add to the lustre of this tool. But the fact remains: it is merely a robotic tool; much like the copy and paste of a prayer chain letter or a bulk email. The real work rests with the individual, within oneself and without, in the testy waters of community.

Nicola Adair

Out of the Mouths of Babes (and a couple of guys, too)

I can think of few less likely candidates to teach Sunday school than this writer. A ‘wanderer in the wilderness’ may be a bit extreme; but equally, ‘no particular affiliation’ seemed understated – casting mind back over the past forty years. Kind of the equivalent of hiring the fox to guard the hen house – but then that may have been just the job description that had surfaced for our assistant priest when she approached me last summer to do a four-week stint, at the time, eons away.

As you may have noticed, children are disappearing – not in the sinister, Golden Compass, ‘snatch ‘em for research purposes’ kind of way. Just a none too subtle fade away. So, if I may presume to climb inside the motivation of our crafty priest, I’d say she was looking for someone who might ‘connect’ with kids, particularly the senior crowd and hopefully provide a hook that would retain them in the parish for a bit longer. Someone with a sufficiently murky (or let’s just say, ambiguous) past, who, if we lined up the authority figures on one side of the room and the kids’ buddies on the other, might stand somewhere in between. Someone who, while not overtly ‘dangerous’, is not particularly bound by the conventions that populate our culture – and has been known to challenge same on occasion. And perhaps someone with a bit of a track record of being accessible and available to said kids. And so I agreed – with a condition. That I could ‘teach’ whatever I wanted.

November, being ‘the cruelest month’, rolled around too quickly and my commitment began to loom. Lynn began to lobby for some ‘catchy’ bulletin inserts with the attached realization that Sunday 1, as it were, was less than a week away. I thumbed through curriculum materials and reasoned that a cut paper collage was not likely the hook I needed to catch the interest of an increasingly sophisticated group of charges. Deep breath, settle the mind, and see what surfaces. Well that was easy – teach ‘em to meditate. A little juggling of some basic Eastern tenets, a little massaging of the suggested scripture of the week and presto – a four week prospectus that just might fly.

And so we began. ‘Don’t just do something, sit there!’; ‘The present moment: soap-on-a-rope’; ‘Pulling weeds with the Bare Naked Ladies’; and finally the habitual favourite, ‘Wherever you go, there you are: the benefits of going in circles’ – all certainly sufficiently enigmatic to rouse the curiosity of the adults in the parish. But would it snag the kids? As it turns out, I think the answer is a qualified yes. (The feedback was, albeit disinhibited by a glass of wine or two: “You’ve got a gift!”) Our little group ebbed and flowed from week to week – but it survived. What I was least prepared for however was that I would learn!

Mantras, breathing techniques, non-judging, letting go . . . all proceeded on course. We even managed to wedge the whole thing in between the processional hymn and the Eucharist. Right up to the: ‘establish a practice: regular time, regular place, daily if possible – just like brushing your teeth’. Full stop.

As a psychologist in private practice, no small part of my case load is comprised of adults presenting with variations on the theme of dealing with stress, type A personality issues, anxiety disorders, sleep disturbance, dissolving relationships, depressions. . . the list goes on. But sharing at least one common element: reactions to the complexities of an over-busy, demanding, relentless lifestyle – and generally one over which they feel they have largely lost control.

As our time together began to unfold, the ‘evidence’, so to speak, too commenced to build that this little group of mid-adolescents was every bit as vulnerable to these self same issues as were their elders. L, interested and participative as one could wish, would have eyes droop; K would shift uncomfortably in his chair; S would voice his ‘reactivity to just about everything’. No quiet place to sit. Pause for a moment – and be overtaken by sleep. These were very busy, committed (perhaps over-committed) kids – with no time! A simple body scan, intended as much as an exercise in controlled concentration, produced accounts of headaches, stiff necks, sore shoulders, upset stomachs – as the ‘places where you hold tension’ were discussed. A suggestion that we start with five or ten minutes of quiet time a day, evolved quickly into a problem solving session of ‘where I would find five extra minutes’.

What I began to consider was that this little group, so typical in many ways, had learned their lessons very well. Had learned what we teach – not by our ‘good words’; but by our not so good deeds. We had imbued them with our busy schedules; our value systems built on growth, expansion, achievement, productivity. And by extension, had taught them to be suspicious of ‘down time’, emptying one’s mind (instead of relentlessly filling it with even more information), letting go of worries (instead of clinging to anxieties about the future and guilt over past ‘failures to meet a mark’). A recent article in the New Yorker reviewing a trio of books on what is euphemistically now referred to as ‘helicopter parenting’, convincingly underscores that, in our urgency, our compulsion to have our children achieve to their ‘highest potential’, we schedule them to capacity, we coach and obsess over performance, we lobby to secure access to the ‘best schools’, and so on. The result it seems, in the short run are children who feel stretched to capacity; in the longer run, ones who will cultivate the same debilitating, perhaps counter-productive neuroses as their well-intentioned parents. Certainly not the blissful, reflective and contemplative, grounded individuals we would hope.

That some folks may have picked up on this generational hypocrisy and the need to start at an early age is evident in some very encouraging materials emerging, I think appropriately, in Australia (that would be the geographic, and evidently philosophic inverse of we Northern Hemispherites) and focusing on teaching meditative principles to children commencing as young as ages four or five. Now there’s a concept!

And as the bard would have it, all’s well that . . . Our final meeting was structured around an ‘active meditation’ – a little less of a stretch for such a busy crew. We were fortunate enough to borrow a full, eleven-ring labyrinth from a neighbouring community’s church – allowing us to ‘walk our way into awareness’. Seems like actually ‘doing’ is a bit less of a cultural leap than sitting cross-legged and chanting. And there’s hope for this old teacher as well. Actually signed up for some ‘labyrinth training’. Bit of an oxymoron, I suppose – but as close as I get to balancing bliss with productivity.

David Howard

And, Furthermore.

Very recently, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi travelled together to two of the notorious concentration camps of the Third Reich. Both call for a renewed recognition of the fundamental humanity of those with whom we disagree.



The website of the Archbishop of Canterbury is herewith linked so that you, please, read their individual reflections on their visit. It seems an appropriate addendum to the previous blog.



You can find the website http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2038.



Amen,

Nicola Adair

Adult's Dirty Laundry

In case you missed it, the letter to the editor of the November 2008 edition of the Huron Church News from reader Patti Patstone bears repeating:

Dear Editor:
I was sickened to see the article in the Huron Church News (Oct.’08) on “Children’s Festival 2008”. I participated as a musician at that event so I was aware of the program and the day’s events. I was horrified when I read the following: “...if you could preach in church, what would you talk about? Laura responded: I’d preach about the importance of same sex blessings”.

This article was about a CHILDREN’S FESTIVAL. It is unfortunate that Laura has not received better preaching from God’s Holy Scripture. But what is worse, is that you printed it!! It is very sad that this issue is being placed on the same page as a children’s event. The adult’s dirty laundry is polluting the minds of our children. It is no wonder that the world wide Anglican church looks at the Anglican Church of Canada with disdain. I am certain that an article about a Children’s event taking place in most parts of our world would not be paired with this issue.

I am concerned that this comment was included with this article and I pray for the “Lauras” in the Anglican Church of Canada. I join with the prayer from the world wide Anglican church that the Canadian church would repent of her waywardness and return to the truth of the Bible.
Sincerely,
Patti Patstone

After reading Ms Patstone’s contribution to a benign journal, I, too, was sickened. I’ll explain.

Some weeks ago, I happened upon a TVO programme that studied the British Empire’s involvement with slavery. The researcher was in Ghana at a former British slavery depot. She was standing in a basement holding room with her Ghanaian guide; the room was about the size of St. James’ lower parish hall. The guide explained that, typically, the room would have been filled with about 3000 men. Their wives and children would have been separated from them and held in different rooms. All would be waiting for their deportation as slaves. Families separated forever; lives changed forever with horrid consequences.

What sickened me, aside from this factual representation of what occurred in that basement room, was the fact that a Christian chapel stood over the room. And, ‘the truths of the Bible’ were being preached while thousands of native Ghanaian suffered in inhumane conditions, not unlike the concentration camps of the Third Reich.

Just last week, we were called to remember the lives of those who suffered death while fighting for the freedom of humanity. Our rector told his parish how he will remember the name of a two year old Jewish child, Dora Rosenblum, who succumbed in a concentration camp.

I was reminded that the German Jewish community was one of the targeted groups for the Nazis as they sought to purge Germany of race enemies and “lives unworthy of living”. Six million Jews were slaughtered. Five million Russians, Poles and Roma died in this purging as did four million Catholics and thousands of mentally disabled, other religious minorities and approximately 55,000 German homosexuals.

The treatment of homosexuals detained in post-war concentration camps went unacknowledged by most countries or churches. Some that did escape were even re-arrested and imprisoned based on evidence found in the Nazi years. It was not until the 1980’s that the German government acknowledged this episode, and not until 2002 that the government apologized to the gay community. In 2005, the European parliament adopted a resolution regarding the Holocaust where the persecution of homosexuals was mentioned:

27 January 2005, the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Nazi Germany’s death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau where a combined total of up to 1.5 million Jews, Roma, Poles, Russians and prisoners of various other nationalities, and homosexuals, were murdered, is not only a major occasion for European citizens to remember and condemn the enormous horror and tragedy of the Holocaust, but also for addressing the disturbing rise in anti-semitism, and especially anti-semitic incidents, in Europe, and for learning anew the wider lessons about the dangers of victimizing people on the basis of race, ethnic origin, religion, social classification, politics or sexual orientation...

Slaves in the basement; gays in the post-war concentration camps: all while churches were filled with those “receiving better preaching from God’s Holy Scripture”.

Fast forward to the new millennium: not only are Afro-Americans allowed to marry but, and merely 150 later, a powerful Afro-American couple will soon reside in the White House. Homosexuals are no longer jailed (1969, Canada decriminalizes homosexual acts) but are serving as priests in the Anglican Church. Today, same-gendre parents are supported by the positions of a number of organizations, including the American Psychological Association, the Child Welfare League of America, the American Bar Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the National Association of Social Workers, the North American Council on Adoptable Children, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychoanalytic Association, and the American Academy of Family Physicians.

The American Psychological Association has stated that:

There is no scientific evidence that parenting effectiveness is related to parental sexual orientation: Lesbian and gay parents are as likely as heterosexual parents to provide supportive and healthy environments for their children...research has shown that the adjustment, development and psychological well-being of children is unrelated to parental sexual orientation and that the children of lesbian and gay parents are as likely as those of heterosexual parents to flourish...

As well, from the Children’s Development for Social Competence Across Family Types, a major report prepared by the Canadian Department of Justice, in July 2006, but not released by the government until forced to do so by a request under the Access to Information Act, in May 2007, reaches this conclusion:

The strongest conclusion that can be drawn from the empirical literature is that the vast majority of studies show that children living with two mothers and children living with a mother and a father have the same levels of social competence. A few studies suggest that children with two lesbian mothers have marginally better competence than children in traditional nuclear families, even fewer studies show the opposite, and most studies fail to find any difference. The very limited body of evidence with two gay fathers supports this same conclusion.

By failing to offer same-gendre marriage blessings, the church promotes a form of double-standard mongering: relationships in the heterosexual constellation are right; those in the homosexual constellation are wrong. And as social tolerance endorses the non-traditional nuclear family, the church continues to turn its eyes as it did, for too long, with slavery and homosexuality.

In the United States, the F.B.I. reported that 15.6% of hate crimes reported to police in 2004 were based on perceived sexual orientation. 61% of these attacks were against gay men. The important word here is ‘hate’. Open acts of violence against gays are socially unacceptable, we would all agree (I hope). But what about what ‘soft’ acts of hatred...like a letter to the editor.

Hate: to dislike intensely or passionately; feel extreme aversion for or extreme hostility toward; detest.

My sickened response to Patti Patstone’s reply to Laura’s answer came from the awareness of hate mongering. “The adult’s dirty laundry is polluting the minds of our children”. I would agree with you Patti: but it is the dirty laundry of political, social and religious intolerance and discrimination that pollutes minds.

My hope rests in the “Lauras” of her and future generations to come to power who will forgive the sins of their parents and will tear down the walls of this type of discrimination and intolerance.

For you, Patti, I recommend these words for prayerful contemplation: Matthew 25:40, "Truly, I tell you, just as you did to the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.". From St. Francis of Assisi, “Preach the gospel every day; if necessary, use words.” And from Martin Luther, “Love is the image of God.”

Nicola Adair

So, How Big is Your Amygdala?

So what is a psychopath anyway? For most of us, say the word and the Charlie Manson’s, the Hannibal Lector’s, the Jack the Ripper’s spring to mind. Tough to argue that these characters definitely do qualify. Clinically, it’s a tad more complicated though than donning a goalie’s mask when you own a carving set and no skates; or firing up the latest version of your Stihl MS 460 and waiting for the next, naïve, car load of unsuspecting teenagers to roll into the front yard. There’s that penchant for telling porkies; for picking fights – just to pick a fight; for generally finding yourself on the questionable side of the bars – the steel ones, not the fun ones; for sporting an emotional ‘body temperature’ somewhere between cold and frozen – that would be conscienceless; for having the capacity to sustain relationship somewhere between a junk yard dog and a hooker (without the heart) . . . to mention a few of the more endearing features.

I recently attended a symposium conducted by one of the more renowned researchers in this field, Robert Hare, as I searched for interesting ways to spend my summer vacation – and do the regular upgrading that allows me to distinguish these folks from those of us in the general population. (Not everyone carries a loaded assault rifle and dresses in Goth or army fatigues.) Bob has not only identified the twenty, cardinal features that single out likely candidates; but has managed to demonstrate some rather interesting differences in the way these characters’ brains work when presented emotionally charged material. In a nutshell, it amounts for your average psychopath to reacting (at a cortical level) in about the same way whether you’re looking at Rembrandt or road kill. (Seen No Country For Old Men yet?)

But the truly telling feature is the absence of a little, very human feature called ‘empathy’. The everyman definition of empathy goes something like: ‘the capacity to understand and identify with another’s perspective; to experience the same feelings as another; putting oneself in another’s shoes’ . . . and so on. A slightly more discerning element is ‘the ability to accurately discriminate the emotional state / response of another (to one’s actions)’. And Bob has tossed us another curve in his most recent book, Snakes in Suits. These folks are not only walking around amongst us – but are so good at insinuating themselves into our good graces, are so superficially attractive to us that we actually welcome them, admire their 100 watt smiles, and are impressed by their firm hand shakes.

As is so often the case, Lynn’s eloquent homilies trigger lots of thought for me – just not always the bright and sunny ones. Her deconstruction of the metaphoric meanings of ‘salt’ – in particular, the “you may be the only gospel your neighbour reads” closing – really stuck with me; and sure enough, reflections on not only how we speak and conduct ourselves, whatever our best intentions might be – but also how these words and actions are perceived by those on the receiving end; how we are experienced by others, began to boil and bubble.

So what does all this have to do with the closet Ted Bundy’s lurking in the narthex? Well, in making this connection, partly it’s helpful to be inside the mind of a psychologist whose charge it is to spot and tag such specimens – although Nicola’s forever pointing out that “not everyone thinks like you!” (I can only assume that the unexpressed parenthetical is – “and a good thing, too”.) At the risk of being a bit too reductionist, a view commonly held (and seemingly supported by Hare’s research) is that ‘psychopaths are born, not made’. This is certainly not to say that this is strictly a nature (vs. nurture – you know, the genes we walk around with vs. the families that ‘brung us up’) issue. But essentially, the brain is subtly different in structure – and therein lies the root of many of those nasty little predispositions I’ve listed above. And that would include the capacity for empathy and it’s extension; namely our capacity to monitor the impact of what we say and do and to ‘read’ the impact these words and deeds have on those around us.

In short, if we accept the teachings of these extremes in behaviour, some of us can ‘see’ what we’re saying and the potential good (or ill) it might engender; and some of us can’t – all a function of the hard wiring we bring to the task. Some of us get stuck in the ‘rightness’ of our perspective and are really unable to get past the content of our ‘personal gospel’ (that our neighbours are reading). And some of us are better equipped to ‘take the temperature’ of the exchange, let go of the content to an extent, and adjust our ‘message’ – largely predicated on the reactions of that vulnerable and under-read neighbour. Some of us are pure teachers (in Lynn’s metaphor, the ‘book’ on this subject or that), secure in the knowledge that what we’re sharing and how it’s framed is, well, just what is. Some of us are endowed with a capacity to attend – in our empathic model, to listen to our words, our gospel and appreciate not just its message, but its impact, its reception. All a function of a little structure buried deep in our brain and one most of us would struggle to spell, much less pronounce: the Amygdala.

So as we venture ‘out there’, as Lynn homilized, as we carry our particular gospel to those next door, two blocks over, or beside us on the bus, let us be mindful of, let us be sensitive to – to the extent we are able – the ‘what’ we pass along and most particularly the ‘how’ we are heard. We forego, ignore, or are simply insensitive to the latter at our peril, alienating where we most wish to foster; disaffecting those we most wish to include. For we may indeed be the only gospel our neighbour reads.

David Howard