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fredbsmith · 1 year ago

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Fleeing Lake George

Memoir

We viewed ourselves as super-parents, my wife Mary and I. We had both entered demanding professions after our years of schooling. We had defied our culture’s customs by postponing children till well past the prime of our youth, to an age when we were more comfortable financially and settled into our career paths. The new birth control pills had made it possible to juggle two careers with the rewards of child-rearing.

We seemed to have mastered this process quite well. We were later even than most of our yuppie peers in starting our family; my wife and I both changed career paths in our twenties and didn’t get settled into what felt like permanent tracks until the next decade. Mary had gone to law school after first trying a career in journalism. When would her career be sufficiently secure to allow children to appear on the scene? We picked the point at which she had acquired the seniority to prosecute felony trials on behalf of the District Attorney. That seemed an appropriately high rung on the career ladder.

But conception did not occur as soon as we expected. Our family development schedule was delayed. I was now close to forty and Mary two years younger. We worried that we had waited too long, that we had become too old. But, thanks to a medical infertility specialist, Mary eventually became pregnant and successfully bore our first child, a little boy we named Derek.

Our new lifestyle combined the nurture and care of our new child with our continued devotion to work. But we had ample resources, with a large home in the suburbs, and the two professional salaries. We hired a full-time nanny. By the time our little Derek had progressed from baby to toddler, we thought we had everything worked out in the way of work-life balance. Now to advance to the planning stage for child #2, and our idealized nuclear family would be complete.

It seemed inevitable that the process would be smoother the second time around. We now knew from experience the hoops that had to be jumped through. In her first pregnancy, Mary had managed to get on the patient list of Bronxville’s most sought-after obstetrician, Dr. Joshua Davies. It was now a given that Dr. Davies would attend her throughout this repeat pregnancy and deliver our second child. He was one of the rare local MDs who practiced without partners, so his patients developed a closer bond with him, more personal than would be possible if one were enrolled with an obstetrical group practice. His medical reputation was impeccable – solid credentials and the son of Bronxville’s star OB practitioner in previous decades – and he was a remarkably charismatic individual. He accompanied the routines of the prenatal examination with an apparently spontaneous spoken patter that touched upon the psychological and philosophical challenges of parenting, often with allegorical references to venturing on new pathways in the wilderness of one’s life, or something similar. I tried to get off work to accompany Mary to her checkups whenever I could; I used to joke that it was like going to a prenatal visit with Walt Whitman.

Mary and I had recently found that we would not be able to enroll our little Derek in the most prestigious of the pre-school programs in our locale, the program at Sarah Lawrence College. His name was put on a waiting list, but there were so many ahead of him, we were told it was unlikely any openings would be left when classes for his age group were to enter. We were determined to try this again with our new child, and get it right this time. We persuaded the school officials to enter the new baby’s name on the waiting list as early as possible, before he was even born, when Mary was in the third trimester of her pregnancy. We knew he was a boy from the amniocentesis and ultrasound results, and we committed to a name, Gavin Todd, which seemed to go well with the simple monosyllabic last name Smith.

Mary continued full-time work, planning not to go on maternity leave until the week before her due date. She was now well used to the way the baby inside her would kick up a storm when she got up to address a jury during a trial.

We planned to commemorate the transition from working pregnancy to home confinement with a weekend away for the three of us, a brief vacation in the country just before the due date. It would be some time before we would be able to travel again, after all. It was then nearing the end of summer, prime tourist season. We booked a cabin on the shore of Lake George, prudently, many weeks in advance.

***

The first sign that all was not right came two weeks before the due date. Mary went by herself to an afternoon appointment with Dr. Davies. His waiting room was uncharacteristically deserted. She asked the receptionist if he had been called away to perform a delivery, but no, he was there, and she was ushered immediately into his office.

He was unusually closed-mouth in the conversation that followed. “Mrs. Smith, I’m afraid I can’t do your delivery at Lawrence Hospital, as we had planned. But I can offer you the option of doing it at Women’s Hospital in the City, where I also have privileges.”

“Why is that? Why not Lawrence?”

“Well, they’ve suspended my privileges at the moment. It’s not a big deal, just got behind in some paperwork. But I’m not going to be able to straighten it out before you deliver, it’s coming up too fast.”

She told him she would think it over and get back to him.

The next step was to investigate more thoroughly what had happened with Dr. Davies. This was easy for Mary to do, it turned out, because of her work at the District Attorney’s office. Dr. Davies had been stopped late at night by the local police because his driving appeared erratic. Illicit drugs were found in his car and he was determined to be under their influence. This was reported to medical authorities, and this was the real reason for his suspension at the hospital.

There was no real choice, of course, but to switch doctors. It was not easy because the local OBs were struggling, having to absorb all the patients from Dr. Davies’s previously thriving practice. We eventually found a doctor who could do deliveries at Lawrence but whose office was in Mount Vernon. He was a nice enough fellow, but all business in his manner with patients. He basically remained a stranger to us, since we were to see him over the course of only the few weeks that remained before the expected delivery date.

Now that our original plans had been disrupted, our rosy self-confidence faded. We still had the joyous prospect of a new baby on the horizon, and we had just been spared the enormous risk of placing Mary’s and the baby’s care, at a crucial moment, in the hands of a doctor who was likely impaired. But it was hard to see this as a cause for celebration. We had developed so much trust in Dr. Davies, had found him a source of inspiration, and now we felt betrayed by him.

***

We kept to the timeline of our original plan. It was warm and sunny on the Friday afternoon that we drove to the cabin on Lake George. We checked into our room, unpacked, and ate supper at a restaurant across the road from the cabin. The sun was going down as we began the walk back. There were some young people gathered around a bonfire in a parking lot, playing music and dancing. Derek joined in the dancing. (Is there ever a sight more joyful than a toddler dancing, spontaneously and unselfconsciously?)

We retired to our room, and full darkness descended. It was more like a fog, a palpable darkness, not just mere sundown. I suddenly felt a sense of despair and saw the feeling mirrored in Mary’s eyes. It was hard to move, like being weighed down with a burden. Only Derek seemed unaffected by the sudden shift in the mood.

With a minimum of discussion, Mary and I agreed it was imperative for us to return home immediately. Such quick resolve was unusual for us, we usually dickered about such things. We checked out of our unused cabin and made the drive home without stopping. The southbound Throughway was very dark and deserted, except for the occasional speeding tractor-trailer, and I drove as if in a trance. It did not occur to me to ask myself why I felt compelled to do this, why I felt we were compelled to flee. It was after three in the morning when we arrived home.

***

I took the next Monday off work to look after Derek, and Mary kept a morning appointment with the new doctor.

My somber mood had continued through the end of the weekend, which may explain why I lapsed in my supervision of Derek that morning. He was able to climb unwatched to the top of the counter in our hall bathroom, perhaps attracted by his image in the mirror. He then discovered one of Mary’s tubes of lipstick. He applied the lipstick to his own lips, then, apparently fascinated with the process, continued to apply it to other parts of his face, then other parts of his body, then the mirror and other fixtures in the bathroom. This was the state of the bathroom when I finally discovered what had happened. It was a scene of faux carnage, splotches of brilliant red everywhere, like spattered blood. I could say very little, I just felt enormously weary. I turned on the water for the bathtub, slowly beginning the cleanup procedure, of both the innocent little boy and the room.

I was in the midst of the cleanup when Mary returned home from the doctor, bearing sad news. Our baby Gavin had died within her uterus. The doctor had suspected this on the examination and confirmed it with an ultrasound. Oddly, this revelation did not surprise me. I had been feeling, deep inside, that something terrible had happened that weekend; I was certain of this and what it was finally had been made explicit.

I’ve since learned that a pregnant woman can sense the death of the child she is carrying on a subconscious level. She becomes accustomed to the subtle sensation of the fetal heartbeat throughout the pregnancy and then perceives something has gone wrong when it suddenly ceases, even though she can’t specify the source of her anxiety. I believe this is what happened to Mary in the cabin at Lake George, and that I must have picked up on her anxiety.

The death of a baby not yet born has a sorrowful post script. Experts recommend simply awaiting the onset of natural labor as the safest course, which can take days or weeks. In the meantime, as the grieving mother goes about her usual activities, she will interact with people who assume she is in the late stages of a normal pregnancy. What Mary did, I suppose, is the natural thing in this situation; people who knew her were told the sad news. For people who were strangers, whom she did not expect to see again, she pretended everything was going well and accepted their congratulations.

After the baby’s delivery, we authorized the pathologists at Lawrence Hospital to perform an autopsy on his body, a procedure that can help to clarify whether there were any conditions associated with the death that might affect any future pregnancies. I am a pathologist myself, and the pathologist who performed Gavin’s autopsy was a colleague. She and I discussed her findings at some length afterward, mostly in technical language, although I sensed in her tone of voice that she wanted to convey to me that she shared in my sorrow. There were no suggestions of risks that would carry into the future, and when she concluded her summary by saying he had been a beautiful baby, it seemed a truly heartfelt reflection of her own compassion. As is often true in stillbirth, the autopsy provided no clear explanation of why the baby died.

***

Many years have passed since this occurrence, and they saw the successful addition of a second child to our family. When I reflect on the death of this middle child, as on other sad events in my past, I can see that it brought with it some valuable lessons. It certainly set me straight with regard to the amount of control I can expect to have over the future course of my life. I retreated from the hubris of imagining myself a super-parent, and I think I was a better Dad in later years because of it.

Viewed in retrospect, the two happenings that were virtually simultaneous, the exposure and disgrace of our trusted and beloved Dr. Davies, formerly the rock and cornerstone for our fledgling family, and the subsequent death of our baby, seem inextricably linked as chapters in the same sad story, even if there was no causal connection between the two. And, as irrational as it seems, I continue to feel overpowering sadness every time I have occasion to go to Lawrence Hospital, the setting of most of the events of the sad story, even though its management and staff performed admirably on our behalf.

I’m now fairly far along in life, not far from its end, and I’m comforted by my primary care doctor’s assurance that when my final illness comes, she will not be admitting me to Lawrence. I haven’t explained my preference to her, but it’s basically because the ambience of that hospital is too weighted with sad memories for me already.

#bereavement #death of a child

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fredbsmith · 1 year ago

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The Backyard Trellis

Memoir

It was the summer of my fourth year. My mother, younger sister and I had recently moved from Louisville to Chicago and we were staying with my maternal grandmother in her walk-up apartment on the south side of the city. It was not far from Midway Airport. I used to see the airport searchlights sweeping the night sky from the window by my bed as I drifted off to sleep. My parents had separated during the war and were eventually to divorce, and my father was at that time living in another part of the country.

My mother took me with her to visit a college friend of hers, Gert Silverman, shortly after we moved in with my grandmother. Gert and her husband Nate had bought a house in the south Chicago suburbs. This was the first of many times I was taken to the Silvermans’ over the course of my childhood. Even after my mother moved us to the West, the occasional trip back to Chicago always included a visit to see Gert and Nate. I used to look forward to these visits. Gert and Nate loved being visited by children, and they were among the few grown-ups who wanted my sister and me to call them by their first names. Their house had an expansive back lawn that bordered on a commuter rail line. As an older child, I would interrupt my running about the yard to wave to the engineers of the many passing trains and they would usually wave back.

For this, the first of my visits to the Silvermans, my mother felt it necessary to coach me in advance regarding my behavior. She told me that Gert and Nate had a son named Bobby who was the same age as I. Of course, it was expected that Bobby and I would play together while we were there, but I had to understand something important about Bobby. He was a boy and he was my age but he was very different from me. He could not run or climb on things, which my mother knew were my favorite play activities. Bobby and I could only “play quietly” while we were together.

When we arrived, I was immediately intimidated by Bobby. My mother had told me he was quite different from me, but I had not imagined his appearance would be so strange. He was similar in size and shape to me, but his skin was a bizarre mottled mixture of white and blue that was unlike that of any person I had ever seen.

I dutifully followed my mother, Gert, and Bobby to the back yard and sat down in the shady area Gert pointed out to me. She had Bobby sit a few feet away. Then both mothers retreated indoors, to the living room.

Bobby and I sat together silently for a while. I surveyed the yard, which at first appeared totally lacking in play equipment. Then I spied something at the perimeter that interested me greatly. I initially took it to be a set of climbing bars, a “Jungle Gym” that was a familiar feature in play parks near my home. When I got near it, I realized it was something else, too flimsy to have been constructed for children’s play. It was not securely anchored to the ground nor to the fence against which it rested. It was, in fact, a trellis, although there were no plants growing on it. Nonetheless, it invited climbing, and I could not resist.

The trellis flexed under my weight, but it stayed upright as I neared the top. Then I felt it move below me and I looked down. To my amazement, there was Bobby, who was following me, imitating my movements and climbing the trellis, and he was already past the first rungs. And he had, for the first time that afternoon, a broad smile on his face!

Bobby’s smile warmed my heart. The distance between us had suddenly vanished. And I felt I had just experienced an epiphany. Bobby and I really weren’t that different after all. My mother had been flat-out wrong when she told me that Bobby couldn’t climb. Of course he could climb, I had just seen him do it with my own eyes! So I imagined that I had just made an important discovery, uncovered an ability Bobby had that Gert and my mother hadn’t known about, and that they would thank me for finding it.

My mother, who must have been observing the back yard through a window, came storming out of the back door of the house, shouting my name, and scolding me, “Didn’t I tell you that Bobby couldn’t climb, and you led him to do it anyway!”

We left shortly afterward, amid my mother’s profuse apologies for my behavior, with my own mind in a state of confusion. I don’t know how long it took me to understand that when my mother had said Bobby can’t climb, she had meant he was not permitted to climb, that it might overly burden his poor little heart, not that he lacked the ability to do so.

I was stung by the ferocity of the scolding I had just received, by what seemed to me the injustice of being chastened for doing a seeming good deed, initiating a bond of friendship with another child.

I never saw Bobby again. This was a time before there were heart bypass machines, before cardiac surgery had developed ways to correct the effects of cyanotic congenital heart disease, and there was no hope back then for his survival. Gert and Nate had no more children. When we visited them in later years, their many years of childlessness after Bobby had died, we never spoke of him.

Now, in the autumn of my life, having experienced parenthood myself, and the loss of various loved ones over the years, I can only dimly imagine what it would be like to give birth to a child, and to nurture that child through infancy, knowing all the time that that child’s death is imminent and inevitable. Yet that’s what Gert and Nate were going through back then.

It occurs to me now, that the adults in the story – Gert, Nate, and my mother – were scarcely beyond childhood themselves when these events unfolded. Specifically, they were in their late twenties, much younger than my own children are now, possessed of the youthful energy required for the rigors of toddler care, but barely equipped to deal with the profundities of sorrow, suffering and death that normally are a part of later life.

I can’t help but wonder if my unknowing presence on that visit, rowdy and animated as I was and in stark contrast to Bobby’s frailty, made Gert’s sorrow more acute.

On another occasion, years later, I overheard my mother relate a conversation she had had with Gert when she visited her in the maternity ward shortly after Bobby was born and his terrible anomaly had become apparent. Gert asked my mother if she thought Bobby’s affliction could have been a punishment from God for her having married and conceived a child with a man who was a Jew.

The memory of my afternoon with Bobby never leaves me before I ask myself whether my enticing Bobby to climb the trellis caused him significant injury. Did my burst of infectious, naïve rambunctiousness lead him to overtax his frail body and, as a result, shave hours or days from the short lifetime that had been allotted to him? Even with the benefit of a medical education, I find this impossible to answer.

If there is ever a time or place where I am held to account for this particular impulsive act, I hope that it will be reckoned that the same costly event also brought Bobby a moment of joy, a moment revealed by the broad smile he showed me as he was climbing.

#childhood memories #youthful innocence

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fredbsmith · 2 years ago

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A Sermon

Isaiah 61:10-62:3

I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God;

for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,

as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.

For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up,

so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.

For Zion's sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest,

until her vindication shines out like the dawn, and her salvation like a burning torch.

The nations shall see your vindication, and all the kings your glory;

and you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give.

You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

John 1:1-18

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.'") From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.

Beginnings

First Reformed Church of Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, December 31, 2023

We are so blessed by the Lectionary this morning, which has given us the prologue of John’s gospel for our meditation. This beautiful passage is one of the most familiar in the entire Bible. I suspect it has a special place in each of our hearts.

Before we begin to consider the meaning of this text, it may be worth asking why we have come to love it so much, to ask ourselves what is the source of its beauty.

First of all, it is a poem. It’s a creation in language that engages our emotions directly, as well as communicates with the thinking, reasoning parts of our brain.

It may not strike you as a poem immediately, since it seems to lack meter and rhyme. It looks like prose on the printed page; most of our Bibles don’t print it as lines of verse. We need to think a little more about the nature of the poetry we find in the scriptures to understand it in this way. Although we read John’s prologue in English translation, and although it was originally transcribed in Greek, it’s structured as if it were a poem in Hebrew. English poetry is based on the vocalized sounds of words, the patterns created by regular repetitions of words with similarly accented syllables, and with rhyming created by parallel vowels. We experience it similarly to the way we experience music. Hebrew poetry is different; it is not based on pronounced rhythm and rhyme. Its prime feature is thought and word parallelism.

Consider the beginning two couplets of the first of today’s readings, the passage from Isaiah 61:

Line 1: I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, Line 2: my whole being shall exult in my God;

Line 1: for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, Line 2: he has covered me with the robe of righteousness.

And so forth. This is an example of “synonymous parallelism”: two lines convey the same meaning but use different words. The first line states an idea and the second line rephrases the same idea in different words and imagery. Repetition of the same idea serves to emphasize, amplify, or clarify the meaning of the idea. The rhythm that is the essence of poetry is found in the regular repletion with which images are called up in our minds, rather than the repetition of sounds falling on our ears.

The prologue of John uses a somewhat different Hebrew poetic form, which scholars call “synthetic” or “staircase parallelism.” In this case, the second line of a couplet, rather than restating the first, builds upon it, expands it, and completes it. When the ideas are lined up in the format of a poem, successive lines extend progressively to the right on the printed page, giving the visual impression of a staircase.

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

and without him not one thing came into being.

What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

The end result is similar; the ideas expressed are emphasized and their meaning is sharpened in our minds. They come thereby to live in our memory.

I’m not sure this kind of discussion will appeal to everyone. Many people who enjoy listening to classical music have no interest in learning about things like the elements of sonata form or the definition of a fugue. They will simply say, “I know I like to listen to this, it affects me emotionally, but I don’t have to know anything about all that terminology to appreciate it.” And I guess they’re right. They don’t need those academic definitions—but I would suggest that the underlying musical forms structure their listening experience, whether they are conscious of it or not. And I believe it is similar with Biblical poetry. It engages us on more than one level of perception, it engages us in more than one dimension, even if we haven’t explicitly acknowledged that we are reading poetry. It makes words we are hearing more special, and their meaning more important to us.

Incidentally, I’ve read that some Bible scholars have raised the conjecture that the prologue to John’s gospel may have been composed separately from, and earlier than, the rest of the gospel’s text, since it is the only part of the text that uses the staircase parallelism type of construction. Some have speculated that it may have been sung as a hymn in the early Christian communities in which John’s gospel originated.

Can you imagine what that hymn would have sounded like? To what sort of tune or chant it would have been set?

So now let’s get to the question of what that meaning is for us, why the content of John’s prologue tells us something important for us to know.

I think there are two points we could make here. One is to consider what it tells us about the nature of Jesus, about the special and unique sort of being that was—and is—his being. The Jesus we encounter in John is different from the Jesus of the other gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the “synoptic” gospels. For one thing, only in John do we learn that Jesus, identified as the Word, had existed from the beginning of creation. Although other sections of John’s gospel also indicate his existence with the Father prior to his incarnation, this aspect of Jesus’s nature is perhaps most clearly and emphatically declared up front, here in the prologue. In this sense, John 1 is unique among biblical texts, unique in its theology and Christology.

The second point is that John’s prologue tells something important about our world, its fundamental nature and how it came into being. In this, it is not unique among Biblical texts. It is, in fact, as our friend and neighbor, Rev. Aquavella sometimes reminds us, one of as many as five places in the Bible where we are told how the world as we know it came into existence.

Of course, the very first lines of the Bible begin the story of God’s creation; it’s actually told here twice, first in Genesis 1 and then retold somewhat differently in chapter 2. Then there is a third telling of the creation story in the book of Job, a story some find more dramatic than those in Genesis, since it’s told by God himself—a first-person account of creation—when he begins his stirring declaration to Job from out of the whirlwind, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”

The creation narratives in Genesis and Job emphasize the power and majesty of God; they leave us awed and humbled. And this seems to be an appropriate way for us to regard the author of this universe of ours that we know to be so vast and so ancient, and who must therefore exist on a comparable scale.

But is it the only way? The only way to regard our creator?

Before we contrast today’s reading from John, let’s look at chapter 8 of Proverbs. This is another account of the beginning of the world, the onset of time and of human existence. The story centers on a sacred being who is Wisdom personified, present and providing guidance to God throughout the work of earth’s construction. Wisdom speaks to us in the first person:

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth, when he had not yet made earth and fields or the world’s first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth,

then I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, playing before him always, playing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.

On reading this passage from Proverbs, it is almost impossible not to be reminded of those opening lines of John, particularly because of the parallel between the characters Wisdom and the Word. The expression Word has been translated from the Greek logos, from which we get the English word logic, and which, in the original, carried the additional meanings of logic and reason. It’s not surprising to learn than many Christian scholars over the years have come to regard the character of Wisdom in Proverbs as a prefiguration of Christ.

The two stories of the beginning told in Proverbs and John strike us rather differently than those in Genesis and Job. They do not provoke awe and humility, so much as comfort with what the world holds out for us. By making reason central to the world of human existence, they seem to say that the world is a coherent place, that it runs on rules, and that we humans have some ability, our ability to reason and to understand principles of law and justice, to make sense of it and make our way within it.

This is not to deny that the world is in fact vast, unimaginably old, and ultimately beyond human comprehension. But at the same time it is also accessible to us. These two truths, which come to us in these scriptures, are opposite sides of the same coin.

The five creation stories contained within our Bible are, of course, not the only ones that various peoples have come up with over the course of human history. Creation myths have arisen within many societies around the globe. But they’re not universal. The ancient Athenians, for example, Aristotle among them, believed the world had never had a beginning, that it had existed forever. And it would continue forever into the future.

Scientists now can tell us much about the beginning of everything, in the language and concepts of astrophysics and the “hot, inflationary, big bang.” Eternal unchanging existence is not compatible with the data that has now accrued. I’m not sure whether or not we Christians ought to be patting ourselves on the back for having received scientific corroboration, for being part of a tradition that has believed all along that there was a beginning. I do believe that the eternal existence of the world does not make for a very good story. It does not resonate with what we, as individuals, come to learn about life. All that we ever know, that we ever experience, that we ever love, comes to end, including each of us. If all this took place on an infinite, timeless stage, it would seem to me to rob life of much of its meaning.

I hope that we have been cheered by reading today’s words of praise for human knowledge and reason that have been passed down to us within the scriptures. We perhaps need to acknowledge, each of us, the important role that reasoned contemplation can play in our spiritual lives. We also can’t deny that critical reasoning has played an important role in the historical development of our faith. It’s unfortunate that we are currently exposed to so many individuals in our culture whose approach to their religion and the Bible could best be described as “naïve literalism.” May all of us come, instead, to a place where we meet God with full use of the wisdom and understanding he has given us.

Amen.

#Gospel of John #Prologue of John #Biblical poetry #the logos

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fredbsmith · 2 years ago

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The Return from Tiburon

A Memoir

I. Familial Racism

Our small town in Western Colorado had not a single African-American resident and yet most of our family discussions over the dinner table were infused with racist sentiments, generally—but not exclusively—directed against African-Americans, who were invariably referred to with the infamous and execrable “N” word.

The setting here is the decade of the 1950’s, the Eisenhower years, when I was a child. The national news of the day generally included stories about the civil rights movement, and it was my mother’s and stepfather’s opinions about the leaders and activists in the movement that usually started off the discussions. A common theme was that these people were loudly and raucously demanding various rights and privileges without being willing to accept the responsibilities that came with them.

My mother would often explain to me and my younger sister that the reason she and my stepfather so often dwelt on this topic was largely for our benefit. We were being protected now by living in a small town filled with people of our own kind, but we would undoubtedly, at some time in the future, go into the outside world and come into contact with all sorts of people. We should know that these people with dark skin who lived mostly in cities were dangerous to be around and we should avoid engaging with them in any way. They were not only less intelligent, less morally responsible, and less diligent than us, but they were also inherently violent and hated people with white skin.

My sister and I, like all good children, believed that our parents had our best interests at heart and that we should follow their instructions should we ever come across a Black person. In our young minds, we put such persons in the same category as the mysterious malevolent stranger who would offer us a ride in his car that we were also so frequently warned about. When we thought of these various kinds of grown-up people that were dangerous to us, we felt a certain amount of fear, but we never experienced the scorn for Black people that was so evident in the way our parents spoke of them. It was never clear at the time why our parents had such hatred in their hearts for Black people.

Thinking back on those days now, as an adult, I understand better. My stepfather came from a family of poor Southern whites, a disadvantaged group whose members frequently experience feelings of low self-worth and compensate by telling themselves that they are at least of higher intrinsic value than a Black person. This belief dates from the ante bellum South when enslaved African-Americans were believed to be less than fully human.

My mother’s story is a little more complicated. She grew up on the south side of Chicago. Her father, an immigrant from Bavaria, had risen from poverty to become the owner and sole operator of a dry goods store on South Cottage Grove Avenue, farther north and closer to Chicago’s downtown than the family’s residence. Her father’s store survived the first years of the Great Depression but went bankrupt when the neighborhoods surrounding the store “turned Black,” as the saying went, in the later 1930’s. “Turning Black” occurred when a single Black family would buy a house on a residential block, and their white neighbors, panicked at the thought that their property values were going to drop precipitously, would sell their houses as rapidly as possible, hoping to minimize their losses. Within months the entire block would have been sold to Black families, many of them recent arrivals from Southern states. Unscrupulous real estate agents made fortunes from commissions earned by turning neighborhoods this way. Because the new families were strangers to each other, the old sense of cohesion and shared history in the neighborhoods would be lost, and they became susceptible to crime.

My grandfather, who was then only in his late forties, died a few years after losing the store. His health was poor as a result of having contracted the more virulent form of malaria during the years he had spent in Louisiana before moving to Chicago.

My mother may have absorbed some Southern attitudes from her father, including the generic one that affected my stepfather. More likely, I believe, she might have blamed the failure of her father’s business, and even his death, on the societal catastrophe whose most visible element was the influx of Black people into formerly stable white neighborhoods. Ultimately she projected this blame onto Black people themselves.

II. Redemption

In the late 1950’s our family took annual week-long vacations to cities. One year it was Denver, the next Salt Lake City, and the last was San Francisco. My parents felt it would be good for my sister and me to have a chance to see all that cities had to offer in the way of culture, history, international shops and restaurants, and the like, aspects of civilized life we never encountered in our provincial environment. Cities were potentially dangerous, of course, but this limited amount of exposure, under constant parental supervision, seemed safe enough.

We knew to keep our distance from people of other races who might be near us on the sidewalks or in the shops and museums when we roamed the cities.

We always traveled to our destination city by car. Once ensconced in our hotel, my parents left our car in the hotel garage for the rest of the week, because they didn’t like negotiating city traffic or dealing with problems of parking in congested areas. We usually did a downtown tour by bus on the first day of our itinerary and then Mama would plan day trips on our own for the rest of the week, using whatever types of public transportation the city had. My stepfather would often beg off on these day trips to catch up on sleep in the hotel room. He did almost all the driving on the treks from our home town; he would drive all night while the rest of us slept in the car. (The night driving minimized traffic snarls and avoided the daytime heat. There were no interstates back then, and our trips were always in the summer in an era when cars with air-conditioning were only for the wealthy.)

We had become expert explorers of cities by the time we made the trip to San Francisco. Mama learned from the hotel’s desk clerk at check-in that the municipal buses there had recently adopted a fare policy that required you to have the 25-cent fare in exact change when you boarded a bus, so she immediately went to a nearby bank to convert some large bills to rolls of quarters, which she carried around in her purse for the duration of our stay. We crammed numerous excursions into the limited numbers of days we had at our disposal in San Francisco; we did the cable car ride to Fisherman’s Wharf, of course, and bus rides to the Presidio and Embarcadero, and we combined bus trips and ferry voyages to Sausalito, Angel Island, and Tiburon, across San Francisco Bay.

An episode on our return trip from Tiburon, just Mama and my sister and me, remains imprinted in my memory to this day.

We disembarked the Tiburon ferry, which had carried few passengers that trip, and walked to the bus stop in front of the Ferry Terminal. This was a terminus for the bus line, and the schedules the bus drivers observed required them to wait ten minutes at the stop to collect all the arriving passengers from the most recent ferry. We were the first ones on the bus. Mama deposited the requisite quarters for our rides in the fare box next to the driver’s seat as we got on, and she asked the driver if he could alert us when we were approaching the street near our hotel. The driver was a uniformed black man with a gruff manner, a bit scary to us children, but he agreed to alert us, and we took the inward-facing bench seat at the front of the bus opposite the driver so that we would be sure to hear him when he called out our stop.

A few minutes passed, and then the next passenger boarded, apparently the only remaining ferry rider from Tiburon who was taking this particular bus. It had taken her much longer to make the walk to the bus stop than it had taken us. She was a sad-looking Black lady, stooped in her posture, carrying a tattered shopping bag. In my visual recollection of her, she’s a woman who has obviously had a hard life, possibly a domestic worker employed by wealthy suburbanites and returning from a stint of live-in work to her own home, a cold-water flat in the inner city.

The Black lady held out a dollar bill to the driver.

He glared back at her with a look of undisguised contempt. “What’s this? Lady, you gotta know you can’t get change on the bus anymore. There’s a new rule. You gotta have exact change to get on the bus. I’m not gonna make change for you. Those days are over. You gotta know that. It’s been in the papers and all. On the radio. Everybody knows that.”

He paused. She continued to extend her hand with the bill, but it was now shaking.

“Look here, Lady. I’m onto you. I know who you are. You and your kind. You show me you have money and you have every intention of paying your fare, but you just happen to have forgot—it just slipped your mind—that you have to have the money in exact change now. Such a minor detail! And you expect me to be gracious about it, and say of course, such a trivial thing, forget about it, take a free ride now and pay the next time, that’s OK. And then you do same thing the next time, to the next driver, and you get free rides all over the city.”

He paused again, then motioned with his thumb for her to proceed past the fare box to the seating area. She was shaking all over now. “Lady, you win. I gotta start my route, and I don’t have time to deal with this. You get a free ride again this time. But you should know that I see through you. You’re a cheater and a con artist, and it’s people like you that are costing the city and the bus system a lot of money.” He slammed the door shut and drove the bus out into the street to begin the route.

I have sometimes, these many years later, thought about this terrible confrontation on the bus and asked myself why the three of us had sat watching it so passively. Mama could easily have defused the situation by standing up and paying the woman’s fare herself; she had a big supply of quarters in her purse and we could certainly have afforded it. I think the answer is that we were totally stunned by this ferocious verbal attack on the part of the bus driver. People living in small towns like ours never displayed such strong emotions in public. It just wasn’t done.

The lady slowly walked back to the passenger section of the bus as it began to move and then collapsed into the bench seat opposite us, behind and out of sight of the driver. She hung her head and began to cry, at first silently and then audibly. Her sorrow was palpable.

And then something truly amazing happened. My sister and I were astounded to see Mama get up from where she was sitting next to us, walk across the aisle of the bus, and sit down next to the weeping woman.

Mama leaned over toward her and said, very tenderly, “Oh my dear. My dear. Men can be so cruel, can’t they?”

The woman raised her head and turned to Mama. “I’m not a cheater. I didn’t know I had to have change to ride the bus. I haven’t been back to the city in a while. I just didn’t know. I didn’t mean any harm. I didn’t know about this exact change rule.”

“Of course you’re not. Of course you didn’t.”

More words were exchanged, but too softly for my sister and me to hear.

After a few more minutes, the woman seemed more composed, the tears abated, and my mother returned across the aisle to sit with us. We sat in silence the rest of the ride and the driver notified us appropriately when we reached the stop for our hotel.

That night, in the hotel room, my sister asked Mama about the woman on the bus. “Mama, why did you talk to that lady on the bus? I thought you didn’t like Black people. I thought you said they were dangerous and that we shouldn’t ever talk to them.”

Mama was uncharacteristically silent for a moment or two and a look of guilt spread across her face, as if she had been exposed betraying her own principles. Then, as the memory of the recent event began to replay in her mind, her expression became one of anger. “No one should ever be talked to that way. No one. Ever.”

That was it, she had no more to say about it.

The lesson my sister and I learned that one day in San Francisco was more meaningful than anything we had gotten from all the lectures over the dinner table at home in Colorado.

#memoir #mother #racisim

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fredbsmith · 2 years ago

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Discovering My Father

A Memoir

My childhood memories contain no trace of my father.

He was present in my childhood only in the very earliest years, infancy years, before memories can form and stay with you. He was away, in the Navy serving as a ship’s doctor in the Pacific during World War II while I was still in diapers. He was never to return to us. My mother learned of incidents of infidelity during his travels and banished him from the household forever.

Mama’s banishment decree created a vast separation between him and what remained of our nuclear family. He was never to be spoken of at home, nor his existence acknowledged. Mama remarried, after the divorce, a man 10 years younger than herself, and she arranged for my younger sister and me to be legally adopted by our new stepfather. We took on his surname, and the order was given that we must now call him, and think of his as, our father.

This radical restructuring of our family troubled me in the ensuing years. My true father had had to sign off on the adoption papers, in return for which he was relieved of any child support obligations. I found myself wishing he had refused, had angrily denounced this slashing of all bonds between us, we who were his flesh and blood! Could I ever forgive him for that?

My stepfather came from the rural South; unlike my mother, he had received no education beyond high school; and he had always worked in blue-collar jobs. He had been raised in a fundamentalist Christian family, and he saw the world in stark, black-and-white tones, full of wickedness and insolence, demanding draconian punishments. He professed love for me at times, but even at my young age I could sense this was perfunctory, not genuine. I remember more vividly how strongly he felt that I, a coddled Mama’s boy, was sorely in need of punishment, which he proceeded to administer liberally. One of the cruelest punishments I received, a prolonged beating with a rubber hose, was for forgetting one of my assigned daily household chores. I think he had interpreted my lapse in duties as an act of defiance of his commands; I look back on it, to this day, as a typical oversight committed by the absent-minded, day-dreamy sort of person that I have always been.

I was puzzled, as I grew older, by the obvious strength of the marriage bond between my mother and stepfather, and by the way she appeared to defer to him in so many family matters. She was clearly more intelligent and more learned than he; she had a BA degree from the University of Chicago, after all, the sort of distinction which was quite a rarity among the residents of the small town in Western Colorado where we lived. As the years went on, my stepfather proved a failure as a family breadwinner, and Mama then became our sole financial support. I now wonder if Mama wasn’t doing a little bit of acting back then, taking on the role of subservient homemaker to make us appear more like one of the conventional nuclear families we were seeing on television. I also wonder if she over-valued her marital relationship because, with the bitter memory of her first marriage, she knew my stepfather was not the sort of man who would ever betray her.

I am often troubled reflecting on Mama’s passive acceptance of the abuse I was receiving from my stepfather. Did she really believe that the beatings, as well as his continual teasing and belittling of me, were in my best interest? She had absorbed certain cultural attitudes of the American South from her own father, a Bavarian immigrant who had spent his first years in his adopted country there, learning American norms and customs in Slaughter, Louisiana. Perhaps she really believed that boys needed to be physically beaten and verbally assaulted, to toughen them up, to grow up properly. In any case, I never understood why this otherwise active, independent, outspoken woman, who seemed to have such a deep understanding of the world, never stood up for me. Such thoughts created a barrier that prevented me from ever trying, as an adult, to develop and nurture the loving, open relationship with my mother that I would otherwise have wished for.

Throughout my teen years, I yearned for escape from the toxic environment I had at home. Coming into young manhood, I was accepted at a prestigious college in the East, and I saw this as a kind of salvation, since I now had a practical excuse for minimizing my visits back to Colorado. Thereafter, I maintained both a geographic and emotional distance from home, which initially brought me some degree of comfort.

As years went by, the distance sustained a sense of relief but not of happiness. I was, in fact, quite a sad young man. I came to learn that people who have been abused as children tend to develop the habit of self-blaming. For some reason, it is easier to accept suffering as the predictable result of your own shortcomings, and therefore something theoretically you might be able to correct, than to acknowledge that you have been dealt a bad hand by the universe and that you are powerless to do anything about it. In any case, I had become remarkably proficient at self-blame. Feeling that all of the things that go wrong in the world around you are your own fault is a sure-fire recipe for perpetual sadness.

It took many years of life as a young adult, and processing of memories on a therapist’s couch, before I recognized that there was a step I could take which would help me to heal the wounds inflicted upon me in childhood. It was to search out and find my father. This seemed an important task in coming to terms with the reality of my situation and reducing the burden of exaggerated self-blame I had taken on.

I undertook the project during the years I was doing residency training, the beginning of the 1970’s, when I was in my late twenties. I had little information about my father other than his somewhat unusual French-sounding surname, “Mafit,” the surname I bore through the first grade in school, and the fact that he had received medical training. Assuming that he was still alive, was practicing medicine somewhere in the United States and that he would have become certified in some medical specialty, I was able to locate a promising candidate by searching the reference section of my medical school’s library. There was an obstetrician-gynecologist in Roseburg, Oregon, named Mafit, whose dates of medical school graduation and of naval service seemed appropriate for my father. I was interested to see that this Dr. Mafit had done his ob/gyne residency at Washington University in St. Louis in the years immediately following the end of the war. That was the time period in which my adoption had been transacted. If this was indeed my father’s record I was seeing, it meant that he would have made the decision to sign the adoption papers while employed, hundreds of miles from where his children were living, as a hospital resident, a position that in those days required literally residing within the hospital’s walls and being available to provide care to the hospital’s patients around the clock. It would have provided little or no salary and he likely would not have been able to hire a lawyer. This would not fully justify his willingness to give up his children, but it went part of the way as an explanation, providing a glimpse of how restricted he was in his ability to act and allowing me to imagine how painful it would have been to be a parent trapped by these circumstances.

I sent off a brief handwritten letter to this Dr. Mafit at his listed office address, saying that I believed him to be my father with whom I had lost touch many years back, and, if my supposition was correct, would he be interested in writing to me? I received an immediate reply (“immediate” for the days of snail mail) saying that he was indeed my father, corroborated by the enclosure of an old photograph of him holding me as a baby. He said that for years he had been hoping I would reach out to him, and he thanked me for doing so and praised the courage he thought it must have taken. He understood the depth of Mama’s antipathy toward him and explained that that was the reason he had not taken the first step. He anticipated I had been told many bad things about him growing up, which he hoped he would have the opportunity to counter. (Actually, I had been told almost nothing about him; the worst I had been told was that he was a man who cared nothing for his children, which the reply letter itself seemed to disprove.) He signed the letter, “your loving father, Ted.”

We wrote letters to each other periodically, he more faithfully and promptly than I, over the following years, the years of his life that remained, and we visited each other on both coasts once every year or so. I learned much about him, although I was, of course, not seeing him from the perspective I would have had as a growing child.

He was a tall, tanned, white-haired man, who spoke slowly and softly and with a western drawl, which belied the enormous drive and energy that lay below the surface. He had carried on a solo practice of ob/gyne in this small city for his entire professional career, which meant he could be called on 24/7, around the clock and around the calendar, to report to the hospital to perform a delivery or emergency surgery.

He was never inclined to take on a partner, or involve himself in a group practice typical of most of today’s ob/gynes. I believe he was, in his heart, a committed loner. He valued his independence; he was one of the original maverick practitioners in Oregon who made the national news when they resigned en masse from the state medical society after it started requiring regular continued medical education as a condition of membership.

He had a number of friends and professional contacts, with whom he had cordial but not close relationships. I suspected he was a man who had difficulty with intimacy. He married three more times after the breakup with my mother, each time to a successively younger woman. He had three daughters with his second wife, my half-sisters, who are about half a generation younger than I. They all had the experience of looking to him as a dad when little, and they told me that he had seemed distant to them in those years.

Ted's second wife, Melba.

It came up once in conversation that one of his teachers when he was in training was Dr. William Masters, who had later acquired national attention for his work, with Dr. Virginia Johnson, on human sexuality. When I asked Ted what Masters was like, he remembered him as “a scrupulously honest man” and “a very dedicated researcher.” He didn’t have much to say about the popular book and I was left with the impression that he didn’t do much sexual counseling in his ob/gyne practice.

In his early years of practice, he had traveled to New York to attend lectures at Cornell Medical School being given by Dr. George Papanicolaou, the originator of the screening test for cancer of the cervix of the uterus now known as the “Pap smear.” Ted wanted to be able to offer this test to his patients, but many medical laboratories didn’t do it; there was a lot of skepticism in the medical community at the time, probably because Papanicolaou himself was a scientist who studied reproductive physiology in monkeys and not a medical doctor. So Ted learned to do the test himself, and, after acquiring official certification, performed it in his office laboratory up until his retirement.

He incorporated elective abortions into his practice after the Roe v. Wade decision made them permissible. He took referrals from the other ob/gyne specialist in Roseburg, who was a Roman Catholic and had personal religious objections to the procedure. Ted himself professed no religion. He did not believe in unlimited access to abortion, however. Any woman who asked him to terminate her pregnancy first had to demonstrate that she had a reasonable plan for avoiding unplanned pregnancies in the future (he would, of course, assist her with this), and she was advised that he never performed a second abortion on the same patient.

He was passionate about his hobby of fly fishing, which he indulged in almost daily. He had used much of the wealth generated from his practice to purchase an estate whose back lawn was bordered by the North Umpqua River, so that he could do fly-casting from his back yard.

Ted was addicted to, but seemingly not impaired by, alcohol. The addiction was integrated into another consuming hobby, winemaking and viticulture. He purchased land for a vineyard adjacent to his home and acquired a second vineyard later, a few miles away. When he retired from his practice, he became a professional vintner. He drank a bottle of wine daily as a matter of course, and he believed it did not affect his ability to do a delivery or emergency operation when called on in his off-hours. I realize this is a claim many would find implausible. I certainly did not perceive any effect from his drinking when we dined together; he remained the quiet, reserved, dignified, soft-spoken man he always was. His colleagues and support staff at the hospital, who had observed his performance over many years, appeared never to have suspected his alcohol use. In his last days, after he was admitted to the hospital’s Coronary Care Unit with a coronary artery occlusion that was to prove fatal, he developed a seemingly bizarre neurological syndrome that mystified the hospital staff. They discussed bringing in an outside neurological specialist to consult. His daughter and wife had to quietly suggest that what they were witnessing was delirium tremens, and that it would disappear if he was given alcohol. To make such a diagnosis on a respected senior member of their medical staff would never have occurred to them.

In addition to the character-defining traits I’ve just outlined, I also learned some things about my father that must, I suppose, be considered trivia, but which I’ve always found endearing:

He was spectacularly good-looking in pictures from his youth, with his dark hair and moustache making him resemble Douglas Fairbanks or Ronald Coleman. Many NY friends to whom I introduced him on his visits here commented on how dashing he was.

His full name was Trowbridge Rudolph Mafit. The Mafits seemed to have a penchant for giving their offspring colorful names. My paternal grandmother’s first name was Theil, and she had had two sisters whose names were Leith and Devere. My three half-sisters were named after them, Andrea Leith, Leslie Theil, and Dana Devere.

Ted had become famous among members of the fly-fishing community for the flies that he designed and crafted himself. One such hand-tied fly was the subject of a feature article in Field and Stream, and it was later marketed commercially as the “Doc’s Fly.”

He also acquired fame among Oregon winemakers. The local county museum to this day has on display a bottle of white pinot noir that he produced sometime in the 1970s, believed to be the first of this variety to originate in Oregon.

Ted owned 23 cats at the time of my first Oregon visit, three Siamese inhabiting the house, the remainder domestic short-hairs roaming about his estate. They all had names. He joked that he was emulating, and hoping to surpass, Ernest Hemingway in their number.

It was during his final days that my father and I once again became separated. I actually did not realize it was happening at all, at the time, that he had begun the process of dying. He wrote me two letters describing the coronary events that he had experienced. He somehow managed to use descriptive medical language to minimize the seriousness of his condition; he made it seem as if he would be back on his feet, working his vineyards any day now. I fell for it, and decided I would not plan my next visit to Oregon until he had recovered.

It came as a shock when I was notified that he had died. I flew to Roseburg to attend the funeral. My heart broke when I saw photographs of him in the days before he died, the days when he was writing me the cheery letters; he was gaunt, disheveled, in distress, and obviously a seriously ill man in those photos. I re-read the letters and slowly began to appreciate his artful use of the medical language to alleviate my concern. There was only one unequivocal deception on his part; he claimed in his letters that he was being told he was not a candidate for coronary artery bypass surgery. My sisters and his wife, who witnessed the events in real time, let me know that the opposite was the case. His doctors repeatedly implored him to consent to surgery, and, each time, he adamantly refused.

I’ve concluded that he simply wanted to die alone, and with as little revelatory conversation as possible. He did not want me to come to say good-bye to him in person. It would have been too painful for him. The exposure of his alcoholism on his death bed must have been mortifying to him; he just wanted to slip away quietly.

This seemed to encapsulate the sort of man he was, a man to whom peace and preservation of his dignity was all important. He was not a street fighter like Mama. He could never have taken her on in a brawl.

To return to my original question, the issue of forgiving him for abandoning his parental rights at the time of the divorce now seems irrelevant. What I had earlier yearned for from him was simply not in him to give. And I am at peace with that now.

#memoir #father #reunion

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fredbsmith · 2 years ago

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The Binding of Isaac, Revisited

An unpreachable sermon*

Genesis 22:1-14

God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.” Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together.

When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place “The Lord will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”

Some stories depend very little on the element of time to achieve their impact on the reader. Their impact, rather, comes from a single climactic moment, midway through the narrative, that transfixes the reader--a picture in words, full of emotion, that gives the story its meaning. The words leading up to and following the climactic moment serve only to ground it in reality, for if it does not feel real to the reader, its impact is lost.

Take, for example, that stunning moment in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Notorious, that moment when the central character, portrayed by Ingrid Bergman, comes to realize that she is slowly being poisoned to death by her husband, that she is being murdered in full public view and has no way to cry for help or extricate herself from her predicament. Watching the film, we identify with her and experience her profound terror and helplessness at a gut level.

The almost preposterous events that precede this moment in the film—the ring of Nazi scientists operating under cover in Britain, the recruitment of the Bergman character by MI-6 to become a mole, to penetrate the ring, and to marry the head Nazi—serve only to enable us to understand the logic of the climactic moment. To fully experience the terror of the moment we must believe it is real. Its reality depends both on the logic of the way the heroine is currently constrained, and the plausibility of the chain of events that led her into this situation. The audience that appreciates Hitchcock’s artistry—which would seem to be most of us—must override a natural skepticism as we watch the initial events of the film play out, a suspicion that things would never happen that way in real life. If we focus on such thoughts, the climactic moment no longer seems real, and the movie no longer frightens us--or may actually bore us.

This contrasts with other types of stories that consist of a sequence of events, each of which, beginning to end, strikes the reader as true to life. The time element may be very important in these; Shakespeare’s plays are praised for the way they depict the evolution of their characters as the drama plays out. Many bible stories, for example,the Exodus, are of this type. They do not require the reader to selectively suspend disbelief to be appreciated. If the story is a myth or work of science fiction, the actions and feelings of the characters should at least be uniformly in line with what we know of human nature.

One might compare this distinction in story types to sculpture and painting in the visual arts. To view a two-dimensional painting as a depiction of a three-dimensional world, an onlooker must overcome a certain natural skepticism, something that’s not required in viewing sculpture. But paintings have the power to depict truths about the world that are not possible in sculpture. Each may therefore be considered a valid mode of expression in the visual arts.

I consider the Binding of Isaac, the lesson from Genesis, to be a word-picture, in this sense, rather than a story in time. If we take this view of this troubling passage, it gets us off the hook of trying to find meaning in the implausible events and actions that precede and follow the climactic moment. (That moment is, of course, Abraham, poised with his dagger held high above the bound body of Isaac, ready to perform the sacrifice.) We need not interpret the events that lead up to and then away from that moment on the sacrificial altar, because, in a word-picture, these serve only to establish the logical integrity of the predicament in the climactic moment, they need not be important in themselves or hold particular meaning for us. The meaning of the lesson as a whole thus becomes the meaning of that single, powerful image of the raised dagger at the altar.

Before asking what that meaning might be, it’s worth taking note of just how implausible the lead-in narrative actually is. The silent passivity of Abraham here is totally out of character with the feisty Abraham who, six chapters back, has pleaded and bargained with God not to totally destroy Sodom (Genesis 18:16-33). But the meek subservience he displays here seems to me more than just out of character, it seems totally unbelievable of any parent with sound mind and heart. Wouldn’t the first words from the lips of any parent commanded by divine authority to sacrifice their child, be “take me instead”? “I’ll take my own life on the altar, but let my child live”?

Then we have the implication of the ending paragraph, the angel’s cancellation of God’s command and the apparent restoration of all things to their original state, as a ram is sacrificed and Abraham and Isaac head home. A modern reader, familiar with psychology, would recognize the profound implausibility here. Things cannot just go back to normal. A child who has experienced nearly being murdered by his father would be mentally traumatized for life. Abraham would likewise suffer enormous guilt at his failure to resist committing a terrible act, and likely debilitated the rest of his life.

These implausibilities and inconsistencies are frequently cited by religious scholars who discuss this biblical text. I find I’ve never learned anything myself from their interpretations of them. The problem with focusing on the contradictions of the preface and ending sections of the lesson is that they make the climactic moment seem unreal. If so much of this story is preposterous, how can we believe that the story as a whole holds any truth for us at all?

Is it possible there is no deep meaning to this story, that it became incorporated into the biblical writings, Darwinian fashion, simply because it is so horrible and grotesque that it has captivated the attention of all who’ve read it, including the ancient biblical scribes who reproduced it through generations? Has it survived the centuries because it mesmerizes us, the way a smoking, recently wrecked car at the side of a highway captures the attention of the drivers passing by, all of whom slow down their cars and stare—to no purpose at all?

I don’t think this is true. I think that the climactic moment of this story about Abraham and Isaac holds profound truth for us, a profound but dark truth about what it means to be a human being.

Before we explore this, I want to examine and compare a modern short story, which I understand to be a retelling of the Binding of Isaac set in today’s world. Tobias Wolff’s “The Night in Question” creates virtually the same climactic moment as the original in Genesis, but avoids most of the jarring implausibility of its preface and resolution. The dilemma of the protagonist is more vivid here for a contemporary reader, as it is rendered in a modern setting and in modern literary style.

"The Night in Question” is a story within a story. In the “outer story,” a man begins to summarize a sermon he has just heard in church, for his sister, who is visiting him. The sermon relates a story (the “inner story”) in which there are two main characters, a railroad switchman and his young son. The switchman’s wife is temporarily away from their home, and he has been called unexpectedly to fill in for a colleague at work. He has no choice but to bring his son with him. He will be covering the night shift in a drawbridge station at the bank of a river. At scheduled times, he must activate the mechanism to raise and lower the bridge to accommodate the trains and boats that approach. The schedule is interrupted briefly when a boat nearly runs aground against the river bank, and the bridge must remain elevated longer than usual. He then realizes he must quickly lower the bridge, before the next train arrives, but—to his horror—he realizes simultaneously that his son is longer with him, and appears to have gone down into the “mill,” the compartment below the station floor that houses the engine and gears that actuate the raising and lowering of the bridge. There is no time to retrieve his boy; to his horror, he realizes that within seconds he must decide on one of two actions: he can lower the bridge to accommodate the oncoming train, which will inevitably cause his son to be crushed to death within the powerful gear mechanism; or, he can leave the switch alone, allowing his son to live, but causing the death of the crew and passengers on the train, which will inevitably plunge into the river. There is no other alternative for him. As he hears the whistle of the oncoming train, he pictures in his mind the sorts of people who would be riding on the train, the people, probably numbering in the hundreds, whose lives are now in his hands. He acknowledges that these are flawed, imperfect people, people who have all sinned in various ways, but at the same time each is a child beloved by God, and he asks himself what God would have him do. The same God bereaved of his own son on behalf of flawed humanity.

The sister will not allow her brother to complete the telling of the inner story. The story enrages her, the prospect that anyone could even consider the sacrifice of one’s beloved for the sake of strangers. She demands her brother tell her what he would do if he were in the place of the switchman and she were down in the mill of the drawbridge. He struggles to answer. We don’t know if he ever does; the outer story ends at this point, as the sister’s thoughts go to the loving relationship the two of them had as children.

Readers of Wolff’s story can see it is incapable of being benignly resolved. No matter which of the two alternatives the switchman acts upon, the outcome for him will be the same; it need not be written out. His life will have been destroyed; he must live with the unbearable guilt of having intentionally taken the life of either his beloved son or the lives of hundreds of innocent fellow humans. The climactic moment captures the same, anguishing moral dissonance for the switchman that was faced by Abraham, the experience of two moral imperatives which are in direct conflict with each other, and only one of which can be obeyed.

Wolff’s plot is more tightly constructed than the original in Genesis; the switchman does not have the alternative of offering to sacrifice himself in the place of his son, a distracting possibility that may occur to the critical reader of Genesis 22; and the time pressure of the rapidly approaching train takes away the possibility of extracting himself from the dilemma in any other way. We also see that Wolff has portrayed God’s role in the drama differently; God does not command the switchman to sacrifice his son, but the switchman, contemplating the awful choice before him, takes what he understands to be God’s wishes for him into account.

It is that terrible commandment, the sacrifice of Isaac for no apparent reason other than a “test,” that so upsets the modern reader of Genesis 22. To issue such a commandment might seem malevolent, even sadistic, and not in keeping with a God who loves humanity. I think it would be a bad mistake to let this reaction dominate one’s response to the story, that obsessing about God’s motive could obscure its true lesson. We should simply acknowledge that ancient peoples had a somewhat different view of God’s role in the world than we do today. The ancients ascribed many terrible happenings—floods, hurricanes, plagues, famines—events that cost the lives of many human beings—to the exercise of God’s will. To do so, for them, was essentially an admission of lack of understanding of the causes of these disasters. Today we look to science for their explanations and for ways to deal with them. The scientists who seek to understand the threats coming from the natural world do not make judgments about nature being malevolent or sadistic; they regard nature with utmost respect. If we take the same attitude of respect toward God as he plays his role in Genesis 22, I think it might help us to see how the story impacted its readers in ancient times.

Wolff’s story also portrays God in a way that is more appealing to modern readers; God is most real for us when he engages with us, in our hearts and minds, not when he acts in ways that defy human understanding. And if we go back to the original in Genesis, willing to override the urge to criticize or judge God, and think instead of Abraham, the human being at the center of the story, we can learn a profound truth, about him, about ourselves, and about the lives we live on earth.

I see two bullet-points in this lesson for humanity:

(1) We humans are vulnerable in more ways than we might imagine. We are generally willing to concede the fact of our own mortality on an intellectual level. Films like those of Hitchcock go further than this; they make an emotional demand on us. They make us feel, in our gut, the anguish of mortal fear, the experience of realizing that one’s death is imminent. We are made aware that we, like the character in the movie, are confronting a reality that we ourselves are sure to experience some day.

To face the imminent death of a child, on an emotional level, is something else again. It is not a mandatory experience for each of us, as is our own death, yet it is a possibility that fills us with a dread far deeper than that which our own death holds for us. We are connected to our children by bonds of love, bonds as vital as living tissue, bonds that bleed profusely and overwhelm us with excruciating pain when severed.

To read the story of Abraham and Isaac, and to identify with Abraham (or the rail switchman), makes us witness to, and experience the feeling of being present at, the death of our own child. And to know that this is an anguish that must be borne for the rest of one's own life, perhaps years, unlike the personal experience of death, when our own life on earth is extinguished.

(2) We are not in charge of the course of our lives, to the degree we would like to imagine. Our culture makes this hard for us to accept; we like to think ourselves rugged individualists, our place in life determined by how well we have planned for ourselves and how hard we’ve worked. But deep in the recesses of our hearts we know life is more complicated than that. We know there are times we suffer and fail to achieve our goals, through no fault of our own. And, beyond passive acceptance of suffering inflicted upon us, today’s story reminds us that there may even be times we have no choice but to carry out cruel, terrible acts ourselves, even though it goes against everything we stand for and hold meaningful.

So, ultimately, the story of Abraham and Isaac tells us a truth about ourselves, albeit a dark truth. Reading the story, identifying with Abraham (or the switchman), realizing the circumstances of his predicament are a logical possibility for each of us, given what we know of the real world, we must acknowledge how hazardous is the path we are on, as we make our way through life. There is simply no way we can escape the possibility of moral dissonance.

Even though the Binding of Isaac holds truth for us, and therefore constitutes a genuine life lesson, it is not a story we want to return to very often. It’s not pleasant to see how life’s tumult can cast us far from where we expected our lives to go. Perhaps revisiting this story every three years, as we do when we follow the Lectionary, is about the right interval.

Do we derive any positive benefit from hearing this story? I suppose we can get some comfort from knowing it is unlikely, on a statistical basis and in the world of today, that any one of us would be thrust into the extreme situation of having to make a life-or-death decision of one person vs. another in the course of our lives, particularly if one of the persons is a beloved child. But it is a prospect that is always there, in our imagination if nowhere else, as is demonstrated in Wolff’s story and in William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice.

Even though it is unlikely that any one of us will ever face such a dilemma, given the vast numbers of our fellow beings, and the fact that such a terrible situation is possible at all, makes it likely that someone—at some time and in some place—will experience it. If we are conscious that such extreme vulnerability is a characteristic universal among our fellow beings on this planet, will we not be more inclined to extend them mercy? To be more willing to embark on the pathway to offering them our forgiveness when it is possible to do so?

Such may it always be.

Amen.

*A sermon in format, too long to be delivered in a conventional one-hour service of worship

#sermon #genesis #moral dilemma #binding of isaac

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fredbsmith · 2 years ago

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Murderers I Have Known

Human lives have trajectories that are often complicated, and invariably interesting, when viewed over the span of many years.

Some literary works fascinate us by documenting the life trajectory of a single person. John Updike’s account of the life of the fictional Rabbit Angstrom is a personal favorite of mine, a story that follows his young adulthood to old age over four novels and around a thousand pages.

In my later years I developed an interest in the study of life trajectories, having found myself able to view episodes widely separated in time in the lives of people I’d known in my youth. I may have been inspired by my mother, who would sometimes share her speculations with me about what the future might hold for some of my grade school and high school classmates. She predicted that my friend Dwain, who, as a teenager, was remarkably rebellious and also adept at concealing his borderline-illegal escapades from his parents and school authorities, would become either a criminal or a successful corporate CEO in his adulthood. (Unfortunately the former would prove correct, as I learned decades later. Classmates at the 25th reunion of our high school class, which Dwain did not live to attend, recalled hazily that he was known to be in some way involved in the illicit drug trade before his death and was known to hang out with fast women and drive fast, expensive cars during those years.) In midlife I found myself wondering about other friends from my youth, about how their lives had turned out, and whether their current place in the world could have been predicted from the sorts of people they had been when they were young. I started regularly attending reunions of my high school, college, and medical school graduating classes, beginning with the 25th and the reiterations every 5 or ten years thereafter; I had conversations with the classmates who were similarly motivated to attend such gatherings, and read the autobiographical summaries they produced for these occasions, I’ve sometimes supplemented my knowledge of my subjects by research on the internet, ever since that option became available. I’ve also extended my range of interest to include lives of those who were not classmates, but were people I encountered in other ways during my formative years.

The shapes of the youth-to-retirement life trajectories I’ve learned about are enormously varied. Some seem straight as the course of an arrow and easily predictable. Honor students who graduated from Harvard, that most elite of colleges, who attained success in business or the professions, for example. Others have taken surprising twists and turns and end in unexpected places. Some are inspiring, in that they reveal the overcoming of youthful physical and cognitive impairments; committing to a lifetime of sustained, enormously hard work; or the nurturing of natural gifts to achieve stellar artistic status.

These stories fascinate also because of what they reveal about the character of the person who has lived the life. The actions that have taken place over the greater part of a lifetime can reveal the virtues embedded in the soul. Many lives show a commitment to philanthropy so intense that the underlying compassion for fellow beings is made obvious. Others note artistic achievements flowing from a devotion to beauty and commitment to sharing it with others. So many of these lives have struck me as being equally admirable, and at the same time so different from each other.

Each of these uplifting, positive life stories, obtained by the methods I’ve used, also has a natural limitation. One can know only one dimension of the person’s life, the dimension that is revealed in social conversations and in the public record. Success and personal fulfillment in family and intimate relationships are generally hidden from our eyes, although they also might reveal much about a person’s character, more than we could know from only their public profile.

Some of the life stories in my archive are not nearly so uplifting as those I just alluded to, like that of my friend Dwain. But I’ve come to think that these regrettable life trajectories, lives that went off the rails, hold valuable lessons for us, perhaps even more valuable than those that inspire us.

In that vein, I’m recording here some recollections and research on two lives that went badly astray. Two male physicians I encountered when I was beginning my career in medicine were in later years found guilty of murdering their female domestic partners and were sentenced to prison terms. These two life histories intrigued me immensely; I’ve devoted more time and effort to them than to any others I’ve looked into.

Why did I do this?

Some of my friends have reacted to my descriptions of these two lives with undisguised distaste. I imagine their unspoken thought is that one’s time and effort are best expended on subjects that are uplifting, not depressing or demoralizing. (There is some resemblance here to Harold Bloom’s argument for reading the classical books of the Western Canon: life gives you only so much time to read books, and since more books have been written and published than any one person could possibly read, you should limit the number of books on your lifetime reading list, prioritizing books acknowledged as great, books that enrich the lives of their readers.)

The counterargument, or the counter-metaphor, is to be found in how we—we civilized people—deal with disasters. We collectively spend enormously more time and energy studying the flight of an airliner that has crashed, or the course of a ship that has sunk, than on flights or voyages that were successful. We are driven to understand the details of what’s happened, when we see something has gone horribly wrong. It is a sad task to undertake, to confront an event that has taken the lives of our fellow beings, but it must be done, and indeed it is an ennobling enterprise, directing our efforts to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

While the chain of events leading to an airplane crash is of interest primarily to experts in aeronautics and engineering, those who design and pilot aircraft themselves, it seems to me the study of human lives gone off the rails should command the attention of all of us. We all must design lives for ourselves and must live with the results when our lives are played out.

I would imagine that every one of us, when learning to operate a new piece of complicated machinery, would try to find out what could go wrong when using it for the first time. What mistakes could one make that might cause the most serious damage, or, worse yet, injure oneself or another person? I would ask this first, before I even thought about the various add-on options and enhancements for the machine. Isn’t this a prudent thing to do? Wouldn’t it be reasonable, at least at times, to think of the living of our lives this way?

The lives of the two murderers were of particular concern to me because both seemed to defy popular conceptions of the kind of person who would murder another. Neither man was given to cruelty, violence, excessive anger, or impulsive acts. Neither’s public persona could have aroused to suspicion of an underlying criminal personality. In fact, in earlier years, both were considered paragons, honored by the medical community and the institutions they served as being at the pinnacle of their profession.

Were the acts they committed totally disconnected from the previous course of their lives? Did they just “snap” at some point, as suggested by the image of “going off the rails?” Or were there shortcomings, personal failings that may have been overlooked in the midst of the accolades, that might have given pause to anyone looking to either as a role model? More disturbing perhaps, can our process of socialization, the family upbringing and schooling we receive in contemporary America, sometimes fail to attune us to traits of others that should warn us about them, alert us that these are not people to emulate?

These are questions I’ve hoped to address by examining these lives.

The internet research I will cite was relatively easy to perform; a trial for murder generates lots of documents in the public record, and the killing of a domestic partner by a formerly esteemed doctor invites coverage in newspapers. Additionally, doctors that go rogue are invariably investigated by their state medical licensing authorities and the results of these investigations also go into the public record.

In the accounts that follow I’ve used the real names of the two men, as well as those of the two women who were their victims. I’ve struggled deciding to do this; it feels like I’m committing a betrayal somehow, especially since one of the men is still living. But what purpose would be served by concealing their identities, since their true names and all the facts relevant to their convictions and deaths have been made public and are accessible on the internet? Identifying them here will allow any reader who is so inclined to research their cases for themselves. I have used pseudonyms for supporting characters.

Julian Schorr

NORFOLK (UPI) — A police detective says a prominent blood bank director charged with murdering his wife told police he shot the woman after she came at him with a meat cleaver and a steak knife. Testifying Tuesday on the opening day of the trial of Dr. Julian Schorr, Norfolk Det. Tom Pollard quoted the 51-year-old physician as saying he attempted suicide after shooting his wife Phyllis in self-defense. “I threatened if she didn’t stop, I’d shoot her,” Pollard quoted Schorr as telling police. “I kept telling her to stop.” Schorr’s trial before U.S. District Judge Alfred Whitehurst was slated to resume today. Pollard testified that Schorr slashed his own wrists after the Jan. 31 shooting and left three suicide notes. But he then gave up any attempt to kill himself and called his ex-wife, a New York doctor, who notified police. Upon their arrival at the couple’s fashionable Norfolk home, police found the bloodstained body of Mrs. Schorr, 49, under a bed and found Schorr in the bathroom, slumped over the toilet with a razor blade in his hand. In opening arguments, Wayne Lustig, Schorr’s defense attorney, said his client did not commit murder, but was a battered husband who killed his wife in self-defense. “We know from the final analysis that Mrs. Schorr came at Dr. Schorr with a knife and a cleaver and that he was in no position but to fire one warning shot and then two shots in rapid succession,” Lustig told the jury. “This doctor, who is used to saving a life, had to take a life,” Lustig said. But Prosecutor Larry Lawless, in his opening statement, said the crime was murder and not self-defense.

--Suffolk News-Herald [VA], Volume 56, Number 208, 30 August 1978

In preparation for a background court report … Schorr … is writing what amounts to an autobiography focusing on his illustrious medical career, which earned him national acclaim. “I’m on page four now,” Schorr said, flashing one of the few smiles he offered during a three-hour conversation about the Jan. 29 death of his petite and attractive wife Phyllis and the agonizing aftermath. During his four-day trial, he publicly admitted shooting his wife in the neck and chest with a .22 caliber rifle at their home.

-- Suffolk News-Herald [VA], Volume 56, Number 234, 29 September 1978

Dr. Julian Schorr nominally taught me Transfusion Medicine when I did my residency training in anatomic and clinical pathology (“AP-CP”) at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine-affiliated hospitals. He was the director of the blood banks at the Bronx Municipal and Einstein College hospitals, as well as the director of pathology resident training in transfusion medicine in the CP portion of our program. To hold these offices, one must be a physician with proper qualifications, although not necessarily a pathologist. Julian was not. He had obtained his expertise in blood banking technology and management after training as a pediatrician and pediatric hematologist, and he had an ongoing, active clinical pediatric practice while he served on the medical school faculty and oversaw the blood banks.

It was well known among the pathology residents that Dr. Schorr was an absolute zero as a teacher – at least for us in the pathology program. He barely paid lip service to being listed on our faculty roster. In the kindest light, it was said that he refused to teach us about his field because he did not believe blood banks should be administered by pathologists; pathologists did not care for individual patients in their daily practices and transfusions were essentially services to individual patients. Transfusions were also therapeutic rather than diagnostic services, and pathology was essentially a diagnostic discipline. A darker rumor had it that he looked down on pathology trainees as inferior doctors because so many had MDs from foreign schools.

In any case, to the best of my memory, Dr. Schorr attended only one meeting with the CP residents during my year of CP training, a meet-the-faculty type of orientation at the start of the training year, during which he stated, frankly and succinctly, and in full hearing of the other program faculty members, that pathologists should not direct the operation of blood banks. He made no attempt to describe the goals and objectives or curriculum in the blood bank training we were to undergo.

The weekly seminars in transfusion medicine that ran throughout the year of CP training were listed in our syllabuses as being given jointly by Dr. Schorr and his wife, Mrs. Phyllis Schorr. Mrs. Schorr was a medical technologist and the administrative director of the blood banks at the AECOM-affiliated hospitals. As the year ran its course, each and every seminar was presented by Phyllis. Julian had no contact with CP residents, even to check in with them about how well they were mastering the material covered in the seminars and at the laboratory bench.

I don’t recall feeling short-changed by this arrangement at the time, or hearing resentment of it expressed by my fellow residents. We were in our third year of the four-year program and had already discovered that you could learn much from para-professionals, many of whom were better teachers than the doctors who supervised them. And we were just as happy when the doctors who lacked motivation to teach us just got out of the way.

I have quite a different perspective on this now, as a veteran of the pathology profession. I’ve had the experience of being a pathology residency program director, and a pathology department chairman. I can imagine the headaches I would have had if one of the faculty members working under me had been derelict in his teaching duties. Especially a faculty member with a distinguished reputation in his field, and professional connections to faculty members of other departments, who would be difficult to fire and replace. It’s a recurring nightmare for a program director that his graduates, once released to practice independently in the outside world, might have gaps in knowledge or skills that would endanger patients. Further, pathology residency programs, like all medical specialty programs, are regularly and rigorously inspected by an outside agency, and defective teaching in even one sub-field can result in cancellation of a program. I suspect that the reason Julian’s name was fraudulently included on the weekly seminar list was to conceal his dereliction from outside program inspectors; they typically spend time going over such program documents before site visits.

Julian’s thesis that clinical hematologists, and not pathologists, should run blood banks, actually makes a good deal of sense, both intellectually and didactically. Experience and supervised training in clinical hematology prepares one better for the problems encountered in the hospital blood bank, than does examination of the structures of diseased tissues and solid organs, the skills emphasized in pathology training. Many urban academic medical centers do, in fact, employ as blood bank directors, physicians who received their specialty certification after initially training in clinical hematology. (These large centers similarly often employ PhD microbiologists and biochemists to run these sections in their laboratories.). The problem is that this is not the prevailing practice in rural community hospitals, where blood bank directors are typically pathologists. This is an historically established pattern, reflective of rural geography, and the tradition that the hospital pathologist has an office within the hospital and is always immediately available for consultations in emergencies. In these settings, there may not be a clinical hematologist within miles. And all pathology residency programs are charged with preparing their graduates to practice within all settings they are likely to encounter in a practice in the US, including rural communities.

If a person sincerely believes, as presumably Julian did, that all blood bank directors, including those in rural community hospitals, should follow an educational and training pathway through clinical hematology, that this would be of significant benefit to the patient population at large, how should he act on this? It seems to me that the first step would be to acknowledge the size and complexity of the restructuring the hospital systems, medical educational system, and flows of funding and manpower, that would be required to bring about this change. It would be an undertaking that would probably take a generation or more to accomplish. One might begin by trying to persuade the people leading national organizations like the AMA, Association of American Medical Colleges, American Hospital Association, the FDA, etc., etc., to join in this mission. It also seems to me that the last thing a person should do in this situation, ethically, is to silently refuse, as an individual, to participate in the current system, to go AWOL from assigned duties to teach blood banking to pathology residents. The current system is inevitably going to be in place for years, even if there is a commitment to restructure the system; dropping out of individual teaching duties while the old system is still dominant would do a disservice not only to the pathology residents themselves, but could potentially result in harm to patients receiving transfusions at rural blood banks that come to be directed by those residents after they graduate.

Phyllis Schorr, as I said before, presented all the seminars in transfusion medicine that ran weekly throughout the year of CP training. She also tutored each of us individually at the lab bench when we had our one-month intensive rotation in the blood bank. I found her to be a wonderful and dedicated teacher in this setting. We also developed a connection that involved our personal lives. She, it turned out, was a devoted cat person, and I had just become a cat owner, for the first time in my life. It became a project for her to ensure that I loved having cats in my life as much as she did in hers. She provided me lots of technical hints for living with cats, like the names of products that were most effective in eliminating litter box odor. It was unusual at that stage in our careers for resident trainees to develop personal relationships with members of the faculty; most such relationships were friendly but superficial and formal.

I’ve sometimes wondered whether Phyllis worked especially hard at teaching pathology residents because she felt she needed to make amends for Julian’s neglect of us. Just a conjecture, she never said anything that revealed that, as far as I know. Not to me, certainly.

The receptionist at the hospital’s clinical chemistry section once provided me with a totally different take on Phyllis, when she and I and a group of other twenty-somethings were together for lunch. The lunch group frequently gossiped about our faculty and supervisors, all of whom were perhaps a half-generation older than us. I shared some things about Phyllis that I liked, and the receptionist, whom I’ll call Claire, shot back emotionally that “Phyllis Schorr is crazy! Absolutely crazy! A real nutcase.” It turned out that when Claire had come to work at the hospital several years back, she had been assigned the receptionist position at the blood bank. A few months into the job, Phyllis had confronted her angrily and accused her of flirting with Julian and making passes at him. Because Claire regarded the accusation as not just untrue but patently ridiculous, she interpreted Phyllis’s behavior as unbalanced. She went to HR and asked to be transferred to a different position in the hospital.

This was quite at odds with my impression of Phyllis. I have interacted with disturbed people from time to time, and I’m aware that I’m very sensitive to even slightly bizarre thought patterns in others, I’m aware of the way they make me feel anxious, make me want to look for an escape route from their company. I never picked up such vibes during the tutorial and social interactions I had with Phyllis. She struck me rather as a warm, caring, and quite reasonable human being and I enjoyed the time I spent with her.

I struggled to reconcile Claire’s account of the incident with my personal take on Phyllis, because they were so at odds. It was clear that Claire had been wounded by the confrontation with Phyllis, and I fully believed her when she said that Phyllis’s allegations were untrue. But I also trusted my own ability to judge people and I could not believe that Phyllis would have been acting maliciously or that she was actually unhinged when she made the accusation. It eventually occurred to me that the explanation lay in my observation that Phyllis was a person with very powerful emotions, a person who experienced things very deeply. Claire was, in fact, a quite attractive and personable young woman, and it seemed quite plausible that Julian might have felt attracted to her, and that whatever responses these feelings evoked in him were sufficiently subtle that they were not picked up by Claire, but not subtle enough to have escaped Phyllis’s awareness. I could imagine that if she had felt her marriage to be threatened, Phyllis might have gone into a state of denial concerning Julian’s role in the situation and projected all the blame onto Claire.

For none of this did I have evidence, but as a conjecture it resolved the cognitive dissonance.

I did not see either of the Schorrs after CP training. The following year I was sequestered in a different part of the hospital complex, doing research. A few years later they moved to Virginia. The tragic end of their story came about five years later; I learned of it through cocktail party gossip and was later motivated to investigate the details through accounts in a local newspaper. It was sad to learn from the news stories that Julian’s philandering seemed the underlying cause of the marital friction that ultimately cost Phyllis her life, and to remember having seen it in an earlier phase, when denial of Julian’s guilt was still a viable coping mechanism for her.

Ernest Stiller

BEFORE THE MEDICAL LICENSING BOARD OF INDIANA

STATE OF INDIANA

THE EMERGENCY SUSPENSION OF JOHN DOE, MD

…

3.2) Dr. Doe [pseudonym for Ernest Stiller] is currently practicing substandard medicine and providing patients with incompetent care, using his home in Three Oaks, Michigan as an office. Dr. Doe keeps large quantities of medical supplies, including intravenous fluids, tubing, needles, and suture in his home. Dr. Doe also keeps large quantities of prescription drugs and controlled substances, sees patients, and writes prescriptions from his home, using prescription pads from his former clinic in LaPorte, Indiana. One patient of Dr. Doe, L.S., died in her apartment on February 4, 1997 while under Dr. Doe's care. The following is a summary of Dr. Doe's medical management of patient L.S. for the four months prior to her death:

…

d. An autopsy was conducted on the body of L.S. by Dr. Stephen Cole of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The results of the autopsy toxicology testing showed lethal blood levels of hydrocodone and Prozac. The cause of death was determined to be mixed drug intoxication.

…

Ernest "Skip" Stiller, 1944-2013 (Obituary)

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3 Responses to “Ernest "Skip" Stiller, 1944-2013”

Feb 15. 2013

My dear friend Skip (Dr. Ernest W. Stiller Jr. MD, FAOA, FAAO) was a powerful man who loved others and lived a life of helping. Previously, he was a leading-edge orthopedic surgeon who saved many lives and limbs, and developed innovative medical procedures adapted by other physicians. During the almost twenty years that I knew him, it seemed like every day he was working with someone dealing with some kind of a situation; and made them a priority in his life. He would stop whatever he was doing and go to their aide. No matter where he was, he had a cheerful constructive outlook in life, which was contagious. He was a man who especially loved and cherished his children and frequently spoke of their many accomplishments with great pride. This man was more than a brother to me. His spirit is strong. Over the years he has been a positive force of learning and good in my life. He will always be remembered and cherished; and I hold a special place in my heart for him. He was the finest man that I have ever known or will hope to know. Humanity will have to catch up to this man’s decency, he was born 100 years too soon. He would say with certainty that with science and technology “all things will be better beyond belief in 20 years;” and if I know him, he is probably right. He says we have a lot to look forward to.

https://whatsnewlaporte.com/2013/02/13/ernest-skip-stiller-1944-2013/

Ernest Stiller and his first wife, whom I’ll call Allison, were members of my medical school class at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1969.

This was exceptional at the time, and perhaps still is--a married couple going through medical school together. Like other members of the class, I suspect, I often thought of them almost as if they were a single person. This may reflect how inseparable they seemed when the members of our class were dispersed and then regrouped for seminars, lectures, and laboratory activities. They were lab partners for subjects like biochemistry and physiology, and they were together as half a team at the cadaver dissecting table.

Ernie was quite vocal in class, whereas Allison was quiet. He was always the first one to raise his hand to answer a lecturer’s question or volunteer for something. When two volunteers were required, it was a given that Ernie’s raised hand was for both him and Allison. As a result of their volunteering for a teaching exercise assessing the adequacy of our surgical scrub technique, they acquired a nickname as a couple, “the gold dust twins.” (I don’t know if they were aware how frequently the nickname was invoked out of their earshot among members of the class, or if they would have been put off by this.)

The nickname seemed appropriate in view of their physical characteristics. They were so alike in their physical appearance they could have been twins. Both were tall, slender, blonde, and exceptionally beautiful Nordic types. (Members of our class were too young to know about the original gold dust twins, who were cartoon Black children that had advertised a brand of laundry soap many decades prior. We just thought the name sounded perfect for these two golden-haired demi-gods in our midst.)

Hearing Ernie speak so frequently during class, we got the sense not only that he was exceptionally smart, but that he was mastering the subjects without really much effort. For the rest of us, it was a tremendous grind, more rote memorization than had ever been demanded of us in our previous schooling, and we were perpetually stressed out. We looked on with disbelief and envy at Ernie sailing through the process so effortlessly. I remember once when Ernie was selected to do a platform presentation of a paper he had written for a pathology class, he seemed somewhat unsure of what level of understanding the rest of us had of his subject. He felt he had to interject an explanatory comment at one point that “a virus is very small,” as if we hadn’t known that already. It didn’t seem like arrogance; it just appeared he was so far ahead of the rest of us, he was honestly not sure how much he had to simplify his statements to ensure he’d be making himself clear.

There were other ways Ernie was a man apart. He and I, along with two other male classmates and four women (including Allison), were assigned to the same group for tutorial sessions in physical diagnosis. We did some of the learning sessions together, all eight of us, when we examined and took histories from hospital patients. For the sessions requiring us to perform physical examinations on each other, we were separated into two groups by sex. At one of the latter, the instructor for the men’s session, a (male) urologist, started it off by announcing, “Today, guys, we’re going to learn to do rectal exams and examination of the male genitals. I’ll start by demonstrating how to do this. I need a volunteer.” We needed a few seconds to absorb this; the session topics weren’t known to us in advance. Of course, we knew this was coming up eventually within the course, we knew what elements comprised a full physical examination. If Ernie had not been in the group, I imagine there would have followed a few moments during which the other three of us would have looked at the floor and shuffled our feet, gritted our teeth, and, with the thought that we had all signed up for this moment the first time we decided we wanted to be doctors and that this was a time our embarrassment had to yield to our sense of personal integrity, one of us – the most courageous – would have timidly raised a hand and stepped forward. But Ernie was there, and of course Ernie volunteered before the rest of us had even a microsecond to stew in our embarrassment. What I can’t forget is Ernie’s demeanor as all this occurred. He disrobed before us without a trace of reticence, and seemed quite comfortable having his admirable physique on display. Ernie had the body of an athlete and had been a star basketball player at the small midwestern college he and Allison had attended. He had managed to keep himself in excellent shape while doing medical school; most of the rest of had grown paler and pudgier enduring the grind.

The program for our medical school graduation in June of 1969 shows thumbnail portraits of each of us, along with the academic honors we’d received (if any), our chosen specialty, and the name of the hospital where we would commence our post-graduate training--at that time still called an internship--the following month. Ernie’s honors included membership in AOA, the medical honor society, indicating that his grades placed him at the top of the class. There were a few other AOA designates among us, but Ernie was unique among the class in another way. He was not going into postgraduate training in the coming year and had not listed an intended medical specialty. Instead, he had enrolled in the University of Chicago’s graduate school, division of biological sciences, having been accepted as a PhD candidate in the department of biochemistry. Allison was also continuing at the University, as an intern in obstetrics and gynecology at the women’s hospital.

In the years following graduation there were occasional updates from Ernie and Allison in the medical school’s alumni publications. Ernie was awarded a master’s degree in biochemistry from the university and then did a residency in orthopedic surgery, apparently having abandoned the plan for a biochemistry PhD. They then settled in the small city in northern Indiana, near the Michigan border, where they had both grown up, and they established their separate orthopedic and ob/gyne practices there. Some years later, their alumni notes were no longer coupled, indicating, sadly, that the marriage had ended.

The timeline for Ernie from this point onward can be traced from the public record; many of these documents, dating back to 1985, were made public by the Indiana Medical Licensing Board in 1997, when Ernie was convicted by a Michigan court of second-degree murder and his Indiana medical license was revoked. It is a sorrowful tale of escalating personal and professional troubles.

Ernie’s admitting privileges were suspended at the Indiana hospital where he primarily practiced in 1985. Over the next five years he made a great effort to have his privileges there reinstated and to proactively head off the possibility of revocation of his medical license. He initiated a law suit against the hospital, then appealed the unfavorable decision and lost again on appeal. The documents from these years, filed with the Licensing Board, give remarkably polarized portrayals of Ernie’s personality and medical practices. There are many testimonial letters from physician colleagues praising Ernie as exceptionally brilliant, gifted, and devoted to his patients. On the other hand, the hospital records document numerous lapses in the quality of care he rendered to specific patients (including unorthodox prescribing of antibiotics and pain medications), failure to maintain proper patient records, and failure to comply with the requests of various hospital committees overseeing quality of care. There were also distressing surgery complications brought for review.

Ernie meanwhile retained privileges at other hospitals in his locale and was able to continue practicing and operating. One notable case from this period involved repeated surgeries on a patient’s lower back, complicated by infections and mechanical failures, following which the patient was re-operated at a hospital in Indianapolis by an expert back surgeon. The outside surgeon noted the hardware originally implanted by Ernie had been placed in the wrong locations, suggesting, to me, that Ernie had performed an operation for which he had not been properly trained.

In 1986, to defend himself against accusations that his unorthodox prescribing practices for opiates reflected either personal drug abuse or surreptitious selling of drugs, he volunteered to undergo questioning while on a polygraph. The polygraph record was interpreted as showing that he was telling the truth when he denied the charges. In 1990 he voluntarily checked himself into a psychiatric hospital for 96 hours, in order to document that he was neither a user of drugs nor mentally impaired. He received a clean diagnosis for drug use and the examining psychiatrist noted that he had a difficult personality but no formally defined mental disorder.

By the early 1990’s, his admitting and operating privileges had been revoked by all the hospitals in the area; he continued to practice medicine and surgery from his office, where he used a treatment room for procedures that would normally have been done in a hospital operating room. This site was later inspected and found in violation of various safety rules, including those for maintenance of antiseptic conditions within areas used for surgical treatments.

In 1992 he performed an abdominal lipectomy on a female patient—the procedure informally known as a “tummy tuck”—in his office treatment room. He did not have a surgical assistant, and he did the anesthesia himself. The operation entailed a large incision around the lower torso and excision of about 25 pounds of skin and fat. This procedure is normally performed by surgeons trained in plastic surgery, not orthopedists. Because the patient had prolonged unresponsiveness and visible continuing blood loss from the surgical wound postoperatively, she was taken by her relatives to a hospital emergency room, where she was found to be on the verge of circulatory shock and hyper medicated. When Ernie learned that the hospital had admitted her to their inpatient floor, he came to the hospital, around midnight of the evening following the surgery, claiming to be the patient’s attending physician and demanding to see her. Because the hospital’s nursing staff was aware that his privileges there had been suspended, they did not admit him to the floor. He became obstreperous; the nurses called the hospital administrator on duty, who eventually called in the local police to remove Ernie by force from the building.

The patient, who endured and eventually recovered from this surgical catastrophe, was later questioned by investigating authorities. Her recorded deposition is now posted among the items of evidence used by the Indiana MLB in reaching its decision to suspend Ernie’s medical license. Her attitude toward Ernie, displayed in this document, seems unfathomable on first reading. She had been Ernie’s patient for many years, and she speaks of him in words of high praise, even after having received such terrible care from him in their most recent encounter. She denies on questioning that Ernie did anything wrong in his treatment of her, and she deeply regrets that records of the outcome of her treatment are being used against him. He had, in years past, used conventional orthopedic techniques to manage her injuries from a car accident. He performed the lipectomy himself only because she felt she desperately needed it and could not afford to have it done at a plastic surgery clinic, since, as a cosmetic procedure, it would not be covered by insurance. Ernie was willing to do it for her free of charge. She was angry at her relatives, who, she felt, overreacted by taking her to the hospital when she was recovering normally from the procedure Ernie had performed.

Ernie eventually had to give up the bulk of his medical practice, including the performance of surgical procedures and most office treatments, and began to rely on medico-legal consultations for income. Many of the cases in which he testified involved Workman’s Compensation awards. During a trial that took place in 1996, Ernie became enraged at the attorney who was questioning him, screamed at and cursed him. The judge in the case called for Ernie to be forcibly restrained and removed from the courtroom, after which the judge ruled for a mistrial.

He lived, during this period, with a woman named Loretta Sloan, a former nurse, and Loretta’s young children, in a local trailer park. He had treated Loretta for chronic osteomyelitis and was continuing to manage her care and prescribe medications for her. The couple was evicted from the trailer park following an incident in which the local police came to their trailer to serve Loretta with an outstanding warrant, and, noting the squalid condition of the trailer, removed the children to protective custody. Ernie became violent, attacked one of the officers and was again forcibly restrained, arrested and put in handcuffs. Ernie and Loretta then moved to a small wood-frame house in southern Michigan which belonged to Ernie’s mother. Ernie continued his now-limited medical practice from the Michigan house, writing prescriptions for Loretta and other patients; this was later cited by legal authorities as practice of medicine without a license. Although Ernie still held a valid medical license from the state of Indiana, he was not licensed in Michigan and he now no longer had a residence or office in Indiana.

Loretta was to die the following winter, two weeks after moving out of the house she had shared with Ernie, into her own apartment nearby. She died in that apartment, with Ernie present, of what was later ruled mixed drug intoxication. Ernie had unsuccessfully attempted to resuscitate her, and had then implored a neighbor to call for an ambulance (Loretta’s apartment did not have a telephone). Her apartment contained numerous prescription medications, included an opiate (hydrocodone), all of which had been prescribed for her by Ernie.

Law enforcement officials quickly recognized that Ernie’s drug prescriptions implicated him in Loretta’s death, once the death was attributed to drug toxicity; they decided his actions could be considered criminal and wound up charging him with second-degree murder.

Doctors whose patients die because of errors in their medical management are generally not charged in criminal procedures, based on the assumption, true in most cases, that the doctor was acting in the best interest of the patient and the harm done was not intentional but the result of incompetence or negligence. In some cases, however, doctors have been convicted on the criminal charge of involuntary manslaughter, when the doctors’ actions were judged to have been so reckless as to have obviously endangered the patient’s life. Even rarer is conviction for murder, which requires that the prosecution demonstrate the doctor acted with evident malice and intended the death of the patient.

The prosecutor in Ernie’s case claimed that malicious intent was evident in the prescriptions Ernie had written for Loretta in the weeks before her death. They had been directed to a number of different pharmacies in the locality, presumably to avoid having any single pharmacist recognize the risk of an overdose. When the prescriptions were aggregated, the combined regimen, if followed faithfully as directed, would have been at least seriously harmful, if not lethal. The prosecutor argued that this could not have been done out of ignorance or negligence on Ernie’s part; anyone with even the most elementary knowledge of medical pharmacology would recognize that to follow literally his prescribing instructions would have constituted a death sentence.

When I read about Ernie’s trial, I did not find the prosecutor’s case convincing. It occurred to me that there was an alternate explanation for the prescriptions that did not involve malicious intent on Ernie’s part. Loretta, as a trained nurse, would also have been quite knowledgeable in pharmacology; it’s very unlikely that she could have been duped into unknowingly taking a lethal dosage of medications. It seemed to me more likely that neither she nor Ernie had any expectation that she would follow prescribed dosage schedule. So why did Ernie write these prescriptions? I would suggest it was so that once each of the numerous pharmacies had dispensed hydrocodone and the other drugs to Loretta in the customary 30-day therapeutic quantities, Loretta could pool them to form a stockpile that she could keep in her possession, that would feed her habit for many months. There can be no doubt that she was addicted to the drugs. Ernie had arranged for her to have a surgically placed indwelling central intravenous catheter, ostensibly for administration of antibiotics for her osteomyelitis, but an obvious convenience for an addict wanting venous access for opioids. Loretta’s autopsy showed deposition of talc crystals throughout her lungs, a typical finding in addicts who inject ground-up tablets, prepared with talc as a binder, into their veins. Loretta was clearly injecting the hydrocodone tablet material through the indwelling catheter. (The autopsy also showed that Loretta’s osteomyelitis had healed, so there was no legitimate reason for the catheter to have remained in place.) The next question would be why Loretta would have been seeking to build a drug stockpile. This is speculation on my part, but I can imagine it might relate to the fact that she and Ernie had recently stopped living together. If, as a housemate, he had been a reliable source of drugs day-to-day, she might have been worried that the new separate living arrangement might result in a cutoff of her supply.

This possibility seems not to have been considered at the trial. It made me think at first that Ernie’s conviction on a murder charge was a miscarriage of justice, brought about by an overly zealous prosecuting attorney. It occurred to me, on further thought, that what Ernie did to Loretta, if my suspicions are correct, constitute a deeply immoral action against another human being: providing an addict with unlimited amounts of the drug she craved and providing a route of administration maximizing the drug’s destructive impact--fanning the flames of her own self-immolation. The moral equivalent of murder, in my estimate, only with the assent and cooperation of the victim.

One would have expected the defense attorney at such a trial to rebut the claim that Ernie bore malice toward Loretta. The prosecution had not supported this claim with other types of evidence, such as witnessed fights between the defendant and victim or incidents where Ernie had harmed Loretta physically. The defense did not do this; instead their strategy centered on destroying the argument that mixed drug intoxication was the cause of Loretta’s death. They pursued this tack in spite of the testimony at the trial of a forensic toxicologist that supported the prosecution in regard to the death. (Details of this expert’s analysis of the medicolegal examination in the case were later summarized in a popular book, written and published by him; Cohle SD, Buhk TT, Cause of Death: Forensic Files of a Medical Examiner, 2007, pp 264-276.)

The defense did not offer an alternative explanation of why Loretta had died. Instead—incredibly—what they offered was a video clip of Ernie himself, appearing somewhat fazed, responding to a series of questions and performing simple physical coordination tests, administered in the manner of a highway patrolman assessing a drunk driver. The jury was informed that prior to beginning videotaping, Ernie had ingested the same drugs that had been detected in Loretta’s postmortem blood samples, and they were shown lab testing results confirming that Ernie’s blood levels of the drugs, while he was on video, were comparable to Loretta’s postmortem levels. Therefore, the claim went, the defense has reproduced the conditions in Ernie that supposedly caused Loretta’s death, and since Ernie clearly didn’t die, they had debunked that supposition.

I was flabbergasted to learn about this maneuver in a court of law. It betrays an ignorance of the very meaning of a medicolegal cause of death, as well as the way most people understand causation. The cause of death is determined in a medical setting by assessing all the anatomic abnormalities and chemical imbalances, due to diseases or injuries, present in the patient at the time death occurred, and judging which of these diseases or injuries is most likely to have resulted in death (or, alternatively, least likely to have allowed the patient’s survival). It is not required that the putative cause be 100% lethal in all cases (it may be, but in modern times that’s a minority of deaths). I could not believe that Ernie, with his brilliant record in med school and years of practice, seemed ignorant of such an elementary principle of medicine.

The jury didn’t buy it either. I can imagine the way the dialogue might have gone among the jurors in private: “So suppose a guy runs a red light and crashes into another car in the intersection. He’s responsible, right? He has to pay the other guy’s repair bill because he caused the damage by running the red light. Now what if the same guy goes to court and says ‘I won’t pay because I didn’t cause the crash. Here’s a video of me driving through a red light at the same intersection, same time of day, same speed, and I didn’t crash into anybody. Therefore you can’t say the first crash was caused by me. I rest my case.’ Hogwash!” The jury voted for conviction; the judge sentenced Ernie to a prison term on the low end of the permissible range of years for second-degree murder, noting that with the facts of his crime a lower charge of manslaughter could have been considered.

I think it’s reasonable at this point to ask what was motivating Ernie in this downward slide through his later years. He was not pursuing wealth (he had wound up living in squalor), he was not consuming drugs himself, and he was not mentally unsound--none of the usual things you could expect to cause a doctor to go rogue. I have a speculation about this. I think Ernie did, in fact, have an addiction, but it was not to a chemical substance. It was to the adoration of his patients, that small coterie of patients who stuck with him throughout his years of decline and pledged their loyalty over and over, no matter what charges were made against him or what shortcomings of his were revealed. The prosecutor at his murder trial characterized Ernie’s lifestyle as that of a “medical philanthropist,” who provided unlimited medical care without charge to those needy and afflicted individuals who stuck by him. (Ernie’s care for these patients was provided liberally whenever they asked for it, but it was also unlimited in the sense that he did not restrict the treatments to those he was qualified to perform, or even to those that were permitted by law.) A close reading of testimonials from members of this patient coterie reveals something subtle but also jarring when they describe Ernie; they don’t seem to be saying just that he was a kind, honorable, or generous person. They suggest that he was something beyond that, a person above the level of common humanity. They suggest he was worthy of worship. And it begins to sound more and more as though this bizarre, unorthodox medical practice, with its charismatic leader, had taken on aspects of a cult.

Ernie’s first wife Allison went on to a successful career in obstetrics and gynecology and a happy second marriage. There is an inspiring component to her professional career; at age 65 she reduced her work schedule at home and began to participate in missions to Africa for Doctors without Borders, bringing quality practices in obstetrical care to rural villages there. She had to cut short a mission in South Sudan when the war in that region flared up and the situation seemed to have begun to endanger her life; she did not leave before she felt she had tutored the local midwives adequately in performing caesarian sections.

Similarities

The life trajectories of Julian Schorr and Ernest Stiller have some remarkable similarities, beyond the fact that both were convicted of murdering their female consorts in their later years. I don’t expect that this observation necessarily applies widely to other individuals convicted of the same crime, but I do think it may say something important about the hazards of making a life in our society that’s specific to individuals with extraordinary talents and abilities, which was true of both of these men.

Two negative character traits that both men displayed, beginning in their younger days, and perhaps nurtured by elements in our culture, were hubris and narcissism.

Hubris is evident in the way both men flouted the norms that govern medical practice. Ernie regarded the hospital quality control procedures to which he was subjected with contempt, and Julian, similarly, the standards for residency programs. These rules have been established by communities of physicians through collective discussions and deliberation, over periods of years and even generations, guided by concern for the welfare of patients. Failure to respect these products of communal wisdom by a single individual seems the very essence of hubris.

Narcissism is perhaps most evident in the unorthodox ways both men acted in their own defense at their murder trials. Most people, I would imagine, would be humbled and fearful if placed in this situation. They would engage the best attorney they could afford, one who had much experience in defending similar cases, and would follow his or her advice to the letter, advice which would presumably reflect established norms of legal practice. Instead, both Julian and Ernie saw this moment in the public spotlight as an opportunity to glorify themselves—Julian by supplying the judge with an autobiography extolling his own greatness in the world of medicine, and Ernie by constructing an episode of theater in the courtroom intended to demonstrate the superiority of his own medical mind over that of the prosecution’s expert witness.

Narcissism energizes hubris. As narcissism grows from self-admiration to worship of the self, all of one’s actions become directed to the satisfaction of one’s own purposes and desires. All importance is given the self, and needs and values of others are discounted, as are the rules and ideals defining the communities in which one is embedded. Other persons are seen as instruments for satisfaction of one’s own desires. Phyllis became Julian’s instrument in covering for the lapses in his professional performance, for his not living up to expectations of the medical community. Loretta became the Ernie’s acolyte, providing his ego with the praise and adoration it craved, in return for prescriptions for the drugs that she craved.

Every human being has an inborn deep resistance to the killing of others, as has been demonstrated by the widespread reluctance of soldiers to fire their weapons at enemy soldiers in battle. Modern military training has begun to use psychological conditioning techniques to overcome this resistance to killing. Perhaps the mental barrier to killing could also be overcome in the mind of a narcissist, when other persons take on the appearance of one’s personal instruments, rather than independent, autonomous selves. Instruments become disposable, devoid of value, when they no longer aid, or are actually obstructive, in fulfilling one’s desires.

Perhaps murder is the ultimate act of hubris.

Lessons Learned

I speculate that the courses of both of these lives were profoundly affected by having taken place in a society like ours, so highly individualistic and so highly meritocratic.

All of us go out into the world, as young adults, with a certain amount of self-satisfaction, a certain amount of pleasure at what we have accomplished to date and the belief that our future lives will benefit our society and enhance our reputations. This comforting aura grows as we further develop our skills, but as we rise through the ranks of our professions it is curbed when we inevitably encounter other individuals who are better than we are at what we do, and we realize that the mistakes we have made, inevitably, in doing our work, may have caused harm to others.

But what if a person is talented in the extreme? What if he goes out into the world and rises through the ranks until he reaches the very apex of the pyramid, and finds himself alone, with no one above him? And no one points out the mistakes? And accolades rain down in abundance? It seems to me that such an individual is at risk of an overgrowth of ego destructive to the soul. And there are inevitably going to be people put in this position; no matter how large the group, how numerous the competitors, logic dictates there will always have to be one person in first place, one to whom no member of the group is superior.

I do not have a solution for such a person. I myself possess middling talents and growth of my ego was curbed by my freshman year in college. I would, however, advise people in my cohort, at the middle level of the pyramid, that they should prepare themselves to sometimes resist the urge to emulate those at the apex, the urge to regard them as role models, in their quest for self-improvement and recognition. They could find themselves absorbing personal traits that are toxic.

In my first year of medical school, I was advised by a high-ranking classmate (not Ernie) that it was a waste of time to attend the gross anatomy laboratory sessions. These were four hours long, three times a week. They involved exacting dissection of a human body, performed by teams of four students at each cadaver table, stretched out over an entire academic year--far more detailed and rigorous than the single-afternoon dissections of frogs and rats in high school and college biology labs. This classmate of mine claimed that if you allotted the same amount of time to studying anatomy books and atlases as you’d otherwise spend in the lab, you could get a better grade on exams. I did not follow his advice or use his strategy; it seemed to me there was something inherently wrong in it. There was no formal system for recording our attendance at labs, and, for all I knew, he might have been correct about exam grades. But it still went against the grain, for me.

Many years later, at the gathering of some of my medical school classmates for our 50th year reunion on the University campus, we were treated to a tour of the new anatomy labs. Our tour guide, the chairman of the anatomy department, proudly told us, and demonstrated, that, although modern digital technology and virtual reality had been incorporated into their departmental teaching armamentarium, the core of the gross anatomy experience for medical students remained the hands-on dissection of the human body, as it had been in our day. This was heartening to hear. After the tour was over, I spoke privately with the anatomy chairman. I related this story about my former classmate, and mentioned that this same person had later become a distinguished researcher at the NIH. I wondered if students still used this strategy, which seemed to me to short-circuit the educational experience that he had designed for them. I also wondered if there was any way to construct anatomy exams that would catch the scofflaws.

He didn’t think there was. Actually, he felt that what my classmate said was probably correct, that concentrated memorization from books would probably result in higher scores on any exam that anyone could design, compared to devoting the same amount of time to the dissecting table.

I expected he would go on to invoke what students owed their future patients, a deeper knowledge of human anatomy than could be acquired by memorizing from books. He didn’t though. Instead, he spoke of what each student owed to his peers in the dissecting group. They were working as a team, and each of them owed something to the team. If they skipped out on a lab to study at home, they were letting down the other members of the team, depriving them of the full experience of the day’s exercise in dissection.

Imagine that, seeking to motivate the actions of a person by appealing to their obligation to their community, not just to themselves! How often is such a thing invoked in our egocentric society, where all incentivization now seems to require directing benefit to the self?

#murderers #narcissism #crimes by doctors

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fredbsmith · 2 years ago

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Gun Rights

In response to Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed article exploring evidence-based solutions to reduce gun deaths in the US (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/opinion/gun-death-health.html):

Before looking for evidence-based solutions to our problem with gun deaths, we should ask ourselves a deeper question:

What societal benefit is served when individual members of our society own guns? When the right to own and use a gun is considered an essential part of citizenship?

Guns are killing instruments. They have no purpose other than killing. Target shooting is nothing more than a virtual substitute, a practice method, for achieving skill in killing.

Killing is sometimes necessary in military actions and law enforcement. But what is gained by universalizing the ability to kill other human beings, by transforming the entire citizenry into a nation of killers?

Automobiles, alcohol, and cigarettes may cause more deaths than guns. But each has a purpose of its own, and death is an unintended side-effect. Whether the primary purpose has benefits that outweigh the costs in human life is a valid question for societies considering citizen access to these commodities.

It’s difficult to come up with a persuasive cost-benefit argument for universal access to guns. A person possessing a gun is perhaps empowered psychologically by the knowledge that they can kill any other human being at will, at any time they choose. Perhaps this brings them a sense of autonomy and freedom. But this apparent benefit disappears, at the societal level, if one’s fellow citizens all have the similar ability to kill you at any time they choose.

(My response to the following Reply didn't make it into the Times's Comment section before they closed it.)

Lilo

Michigan

5h ago

@Fred Smith

Someone once broke into my grandmother's home and threatened to assault my aunt. Unfortunately I wasn't there. If I had been I would have shot and killed the intruder. Self-defense is a human right.

Fred Smith

Self-defense certainly is a human right, but should all human beings be empowered to kill in service of that right?

In your scenario, you seem to envision no other possible outcome than yourself shooting the intruder dead. An alternative outcome might be that the intruder, sensing the threat to his own life, would exercise his right of self-defense and kill you.

Our civilized society provides us with ways to protect ourselves against invasion of our homes, without having to kill other human beings: professional law enforcement agencies in our communities, door and window locks, security systems with panic alarms, cooperative neighborhood watch groups, etc.

It concerns me that having an instrument that facilitates killing will affect the mindset of those who have it. As it’s been said, a person who possesses a hammer will tend to see every problem he encounters as a nail.

#gun rights #second amendment

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fredbsmith · 2 years ago

Text

On "Scientism" and Objective Beauty

Dear ___,

Thanks for sharing the links to these videos with me. I enjoyed watching them. I was not familiar with Roger Scruton; I expect to be learning more about him via my You Tube autoplay.

What was appealing to me about Prof. (? Sir) RS was the evident kindness and civility with which he employed his rhetorical skills, in addition to the level of those skills themselves. I see he is identified in Wikipedia’s index as a “conservative philosopher.” It’s good to see that such individuals exist; our noblest institutions created in the past deserve articulate defenders who can argue—in contemporary language—for their preservation in the face of those who would purge and radically reconstruct the culture.

I had some thoughts in regard to the first clip, the argument against “scientism.” RS’s position is reminiscent of (the late) Stephen Jay Gould’s concept that the arts, religion, and sciences each comprise their own “non-overlapping magisteria,” with their own associated axioms and rules of argumentation, their own sources of authority, not applicable beyond their own boundaries. But what is the nature of those boundaries, just what makes them so impermeable? Certainly it is true that works of art are created by human beings and, that human beings, having existence in a material universe, must be made up entirely of the elementary particles that comprise all matter. But the number of such particles, and the complexity of their arrangement, constituting even a single human being would make it impossible to use the scientific laws governing the behavior of elementary particles to deduce anything at all about the nature of art created by that human being. No sane person would carry reductionism to such a ridiculous extreme. But does this mean that the methods and knowledge from the sciences should never be brought to bear in considering issues involving art? Do considerations of the esthetic need to be mentally walled off from all other intellectual endeavors?

In pondering these questions, I’ve found the thinking of David Deutsch quite valuable; DD is a quantum physicist and polymath, who writes on a wide range of subjects, always searching for explanations to tie together the various aspects of reality. He invokes the concept of emergence as a way to understand the relation of highly complex systems to the simpler systems of which they are composed. One would speak of a system of high complexity (inorganic chemistry, poetry) as emergent from a lower-complexity system from which it derives its existence (particle physics, psychology of human emotions). Emergence arises when rules governing the behavior of the high-level system can be formulated simply and intelligibly without resorting to complicated explanations based on the underlying low-level system.

DD’s point, if I read him correctly, is that the boundaries between disciplines studying high- and low-level systems arise from what are essentially computational limitations, of both the human mind and artificial intelligence in its current state. The vast numbers of constituent low-level systems, and the complexity of the ways they are functionally integrated to produce the high-level system, make it impossible —practically impossible in most instances, I should say—for chains of deduction and inference to be carried across from low- to high level disciplines. But DD’s concept allows that there may be rare instances in which it is possible to make such deductions, and, in such rare instances the deductions should not be dismissed just because they are reductive. We should prize all valid explanations that we can find, regardless of their logical construction.

I’ve attached an excerpt from one of DD’s books which presents his ideas of emergence and the status of reductive explanation at greater length, and much more lucidly, than what I’ve just attempted. In a different source, DD provides what I think is a splendid example of a (valid) reductive explanation of a topic in the arts, the nature of beauty, using Darwinian logic from modern biology. He begins by posing the question of why flowers are beautiful, and then devotes a chapter to its answer. Remarkably, that answer includes an argument that at least some things have beauty as part of their objective reality, that this beauty is independent of the subjective experience of the perceiving individuals or their cultures, or even of the human species. I’ve attached an excerpt from this, also.

Fred

At present, we have only approximations to a reductive ‘theory of everything’. These can already predict quite accurate laws of motion for individual subatomic particles. From these laws, present-day computers can calculate the motion of any isolated group of a few interacting particles in some detail, given their initial state. But even the smallest speck of matter visible to the naked eye contains trillions of atoms, each composed of many subatomic particles, and is continually interacting with the outside world; so it is quite infeasible to predict its behaviour particle by particle. By supplementing the exact laws of motion with various approximation schemes, we can predict some aspects of the gross behaviour of quite large objects – for instance, the temperature at which a given chemical compound will melt or boil. Much of basic chemistry has been reduced to physics in this way. But for higher-level sciences the reductionist programme is a matter of principle only. No one expects actually to deduce many principles of biology, psychology or politics from those of physics. The reason why higher-level subjects can be studied at all is that under special circumstances the stupendously complex behaviour of vast numbers of particles resolves itself into a measure of simplicity and comprehensibility. This is called emergence: high-level simplicity ‘emerges’ from low-level complexity. High-level phenomena about which there are comprehensible facts that are not simply deducible from lower-level theories are called emergent phenomena. For example, a wall might be strong because its builders feared that their enemies might try to force their way through it. This is a high-level explanation of the wall’s strength, not deducible from (though not incompatible with) the low-level explanation I gave above. ‘Builders’, ‘enemies’, ‘fear’ and ‘trying’ are all emergent phenomena. The purpose of high-level sciences is to enable us to understand emergent phenomena, of which the most important are, as we shall see, life, thought and computation. By the way, the opposite of reductionism, holism – the idea that the only legitimate explanations are in terms of higher-level systems - is an even greater error than reductionism. What do holists expect us to do? Cease our search for the molecular origin of diseases? Deny that human beings are made of subatomic particles? Where reductive explanations exist, they are just as desirable as any other explanations. Where whole sciences are reducible to lower-level sciences, it is just as incumbent upon us as scientists to find those reductions as it is to discover any other knowledge. A reductionist thinks that science is about analysing things into components. An instrumentalist thinks that it is about predicting things. To either of them, the existence of high-level sciences is merely a matter of convenience. Complexity prevents us from using fundamental physics to make high-level predictions, so instead we guess what those predictions would be if we could make them – emergence gives us a chance of doing that successfully – and supposedly that is what the higher-level sciences are about. Thus to reductionists and instrumentalists, who disregard both the real structure and the real purpose of scientific knowledge, the base of the predictive hierarchy of physics is by definition the ‘theory of everything’. But to everyone else scientific knowledge consists of explanations, and the structure of scientific explanation does not reflect the reductionist hierarchy. There are explanations at every level of the hierarchy. Many of them are autonomous, referring only to concepts at that particular level (for instance, ‘the bear ate the honey because it was hungry’). Many involve deductions in the opposite direction to that of reductive explanation. That is, they explain things not by analysing them into smaller, simpler things but by regarding them as components of larger, more complex things – about which we nevertheless have explanatory theories.

Deutsch, David. The Fabric of Reality (pp. 20-22). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Occasionally it happens by chance that the parochial criteria of attractiveness that evolved within a species produce something that looks beautiful to us: the peacock’s tail is an example. But that is a rare anomaly: in the overwhelming majority of species, we do not share any of their criteria for finding something attractive. Yet with flowers--most flowers--we do. Sometimes a leaf can be beautiful; even a puddle of water can. But, again, only by rare chance. With flowers it is reliable.

It is another regularity in nature. What is the explanation? Why are flowers beautiful?

Given the prevailing assumptions in the scientific community—which are still rather empiricist and reductionist--it may seem plausible that flowers are not objectively beautiful, and that their attractiveness is merely a cultural phenomenon. But I think that that fails closer inspection. We find flowers beautiful that we have never seen before, and which have not been known to our culture before--and quite reliably, for most humans in most cultures. The same is not true of the roots of plants, or the leaves. Why only the flowers?

One unusual aspect of the flower-insect co-evolution is that it involved the creation of a complex code, or language, for signalling information between species. It had to be complex because the genes were facing a difficult communication problem. The code had to be, on the one hand, easily recognizable by the right insects, and, on the other, difficult to forge by other species of flower--for if other species could cause their pollen to be spread by the same insects without having to manufacture nectar for them, which requires energy, they would have a selective advantage. So the criterion that was evolving in the insects had to be discriminating enough to pick the right flowers and not crude imitations; and the flower’s design had to be such that no design that other flower species could easily evolve could be mistaken for it. Thus both the criterion and the means of meeting it had to be hard to vary. When genes are facing a similar problem within a species, notably in the co-evolution of criteria and characteristics for choosing mates, they already have a large amount of shared genetic knowledge to draw on. For instance, even before any such co-evolution begins, the genome may already contain adaptations for recognizing fellow members of the species, and for detecting various attributes of them. Moreover, the attributes that a mate is searching for may initially be objectively useful ones--such as neck length in a giraffe. One theory of the evolution of giraffe necks is that it began as an adaptation for feeding, but then continued through sexual selection. However, there is no such shared knowledge to build on across the gap between distant species. They are starting from scratch.

And therefore my guess is that the easiest way to signal across such a gap with hard-to-forge patterns designed to be recognized by hard- to emulate pattern-matching algorithms is to use objective standards of beauty. So flowers have to create objective beauty, and insects have to recognize objective beauty. Consequently the only species that are attracted by flowers are the insect species that co-evolved to do so--and humans.

If true, this means that Dawkins’ daughter was partly right about the flowers after all. They are there to make the world pretty; or, at least, prettiness is no accidental side effect but is what they specifically evolved to have. Not because anything intended the world to be pretty, but because the best-replicating genes depend on embodying objective prettiness to get themselves replicated. The case of honey, for instance, is very different. The reason that honey--which is sugar water --is easy for flowers and bees to make, and why its taste is attractive to humans and insects alike, is that we do all have a shared genetic heritage going back to our common ancestor and before, which includes biochemical knowledge about many uses of sugar, and the means to recognize it.

Could it be that what humans find attractive in flowers--or in art--is indeed objective, but it is not objective beauty? Perhaps it is something more mundane--something like a liking for bright colours, strong contrasts, symmetrical shapes. Humans seem to have an inborn liking for symmetry. It is thought to be a factor in sexual attractiveness, and it may also be useful in helping us to classify things and to organize our environment physically and conceptually. So a side effect of these inborn preferences might be a liking for flowers, which happen to be colourful and symmetrical. However, some flowers are white (at least to us--they may have colours that we cannot see and insects can), but we still find their shapes beautiful. All flowers do contrast with their background in some sense--that is a precondition for being used for signalling--but a spider in the bath contrasts with its background even more, and there is no widespread consensus that such a sight is beautiful. As for symmetry: again, spiders are quite symmetrical, while some flowers, such as orchids, are very unsymmetrical, yet we do not find them any less attractive for that. So I do not think that symmetry, colour and contrast are all that we are seeing in flowers when we imagine that we are seeing beauty.

A sort of mirror image of that objection is that there are other things in nature that we also find beautiful--things that are not results of either human creativity or co-evolution across a gap: the night sky; waterfalls; sunsets. So why not flowers too? But the cases are not alike. Those things may be attractive to look at, but they have no appearance of design. They are analogous not to Paley’s watch, but to the sun as a timekeeper. One cannot explain why the watch is as it is without referring to timekeeping, because it would be useless for timekeeping if it had been made slightly differently. But, as I mentioned, the sun would still be useful for keeping time even if the solar system were altered. Similarly, Paley might have found a stone that looked attractive. He might well have taken it home to use as an ornamental paperweight. But he would not have sat down to write a monograph about how changing any detail of the stone would have made it incapable of serving that function, because that would not have been so. The same is true of the night sky, waterfalls and almost all other natural phenomena. But flowers do have the appearance of design for beauty: if they looked like leaves, or roots, they would lose their universal appeal. Displace even one petal, and there would be diminishment.

We know what the watch was designed for, but we do not know what beauty is. We are in a similar position to an archaeologist who finds inscriptions in an unknown language in an ancient tomb: they look like writing and not just meaningless marks on the walls. Conceivably this is mistaken, but they look as though they were inscribed there for a purpose. Flowers are like that: they have the appearance of having been evolved for a purpose which we call ‘beauty’, which we can (imperfectly) recognize, but whose nature is poorly understood.

In the light of these arguments I can see only one explanation for the phenomenon of flowers being attractive to humans, and for the various other fragments of evidence I have mentioned. It is that the attribute we call beauty is of two kinds. One is a parochial kind of attractiveness local to a species, to a culture or to an individual. The other is unrelated to any of those: it is universal, and as objective as the laws of physics. Creating either kind of beauty requires knowledge; but the second kind requires knowledge with universal reach. It reaches all the way from the flower genome, with its problem of competitive pollination, to human minds which appreciate the resulting flowers as art. Not great art--human artists are far better, as is to be expected. But with the hard-to-fake appearance of design for beauty.

Now, why do humans appreciate objective beauty, if there has been no equivalent of that co-evolution in our past? At one level the answer is simply that we are universal explainers and can create knowledge about anything. Bur still, why did we want to create aesthetic knowledge in particular? It is because we did face the same problem as the flowers and the insects. Signalling across the gap between two humans is analogous to signalling across the gap between two entire species. A human being, in terms of knowledge content and creative individuality, is like a species. All the individuals of any other species have virtually the same programming in their genes and use virtually the same criteria for acting and being attracted. Humans are quite unlike that: the amount of information in a human mind is more than in the genome of any species, and overwhelmingly more than the genetic information unique to one person. So human artists are trying to signal across the same scale of gap between humans as the flowers and insects are between species. They can use some species-specific criteria; but they can also reach towards objective beauty. Exactly the same is true of all our other knowledge: we can communicate with other people by sending predetermined messages determined by our genes or culture, or we can invent something new. Bur in the latter case, to have any chance of communicating, we had better strive to rise above parochialism and seek universal truths. This may be the proximate reason that humans ever began to do so.

Deutsch, D: The Beginning of Infinity, p. 361

#scientism #esthetics #beauty

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fredbsmith · 2 years ago

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Did Jesus really advocate self-mutilation?

Matthew 5:29 King James Version

29 And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

Dear Pastor _______

May I share a story from my younger days?

When I was in the first weeks of my third year of medical school, the very beginning of the clinical training phase, I served as a clerk in the Ophthalmology Outpatient Unit.

One of the first patients that was assigned to me, to take a history from and examine, was a pretty, soft-spoken young woman in her late twenties, about my age. She was quick to inform me that she was in our clinic to obtain a second opinion, not for us to treat her. The previous week she had been given a devastating diagnosis, along with the recommendation that her left eye be removed. She wanted to see if our doctors agreed with this. The diagnosis she had been given was malignant melanoma of the retina.

When I examined her eyes with the ophthalmoscope, the right eye appeared normal, but the entire vitreous compartment of the left was obscured by a dark object the size of a marble. It was a shocking sight for a beginner expecting the changes of all eye diseases to be subtle. Not surprisingly, she had no vision in that eye.

I felt emotionally on edge when I went back to present and summarize my findings to the Attending Ophthalmologist. Perhaps our being the same age had something to do with the way my heart went out to this poor young soul. At the back of my mind was the question of whether more deliberation and testing should be done before the recommended surgery. Should there be biopsy confirmation of the diagnosis before removing the eye?

The Attending Ophthalmologist and I returned to the examining room, where he repeated the examination and asked a few questions. He told the young woman that we would leave to confer about her case and return shortly to give our recommendations.

Back in his office, I shared my misgivings with him regarding the need for additional testing. Instead of addressing these directly, he simply turned to me and asked, “When is her surgery scheduled?” She had told me that it was for Wednesday the following week. He nodded and, after a moment’s contemplation, said “Wednesday. If that were my eye, I would want it out on Wednesday.”

That last sentence, and the quiet resignation with which the older doctor intoned the words, has resonated in my memory over the years. It always comes into my mind when I hear Jesus portrayed as saying “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away…” in Matthew 5:29.

When, over the next few weeks in my training, I read up on ocular melanomas, I learned that it was one of several eye diseases that present such a distinctive ophthalmoscopic appearance that biopsies are not necessary for diagnosis. It was also nice to learn that the prognosis in this case was favorable. A melanoma primary in the skin or almost any other body site would have spread systemically by the time it had grown to the size of a marble; the interior of the eye, however, is biologically very isolated from other body structures, so it was probable that our patient did not have extraocular extension or metastases and that removal of the eye would have been curative. But it's a fast-growing tumor and prompt surgery was indicated.

I’ve found it helpful to think about this medical story when I reflect on Jesus’s words in Matthew. I reframe it in terms of surgically removing an eye, under anesthesia, and with skilled surgical dissection, rather than with the violent words the scripture uses, which just simply seem to be describing a horrible act of self-mutilation that would, or could, be performed only by an insane person. The parallel then is between a malignant tumor, formed when our bodily tissue processes go wrong, and the sins we commit, when we go wrong in the living of our lives.

It also has struck me that the first of Jesus’s words, in Matthew 5:29, the premise that “If your right eye causes you to sin …” are patently absurd. How could only one of your two eyes be responsible for any of your actions, and the other (presumably) be innocent, when our vision always involve both eyes? And anyway, how could a sense organ, which just provides us with information, be in any way responsible for an intended action on our part? Without our cognitive processing and deliberation?

I believe that Jesus is deliberately using this absurd premise to signal that what he is about to propose is a thought experiment, not something that he expects anyone to literally act upon. Like a physicist employing the image of a frictionless pool table (which could not exist in reality) to analyze collisions of billiard balls, it provides a framework for our thinking that makes the problem simpler. It would in some way be easier if we could isolate our sin to one part of our body and then remove that part and be free of sin forever. Instead, we must know that we are always at risk of straying from the path God intends for us, and be prepared to deal with this through the entire course of our lives. (I think this interpretation is consistent with the other verses in this chapter, where Jesus extends the boundaries of what constitutes a particular sin, and leads us to see how we must have been guilty of many such transgressions as we’ve gone through life.)

Two characters from literature come to mind, characters who intentionally blind themselves in the course of their narratives, Oedipus and Hazel Motes of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. It’s interesting that while these two men were not insane (at least not Oedipus), their intentional self-blinding acts are committed in a state of deep emotional agony, arising from recognition of the depth of their own sinfulness.

I found the words of your sermon today, dealing with this difficult text, to be very thoughtful and comforting, and I hope you don’t mind hearing my take on this one particularly problematic verse from the same source. The life experiences of someone in my profession are not always suitable for the squeamish, but then neither are some Bible verses.

#Sermon #jesus #self-harm #mutilation

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fredbsmith · 3 years ago

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A Sermon

Proverbs 25:6-7

Do not put yourself forward in the king's presence or stand in the place of the great;

for it is better to be told, "Come up here," than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.

Luke 14:1, 7-14

On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely.

When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable. "When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, `Give this person your place,' and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, `Friend, move up higher'; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."

He said also to the one who had invited him, "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

Multidimensional

First Reformed Church of Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, August 28, 2022

It was a sunny, crisp Saturday morning in mid-winter, many years before I retired, many years before the pandemic arrived and changed all of our lives, and it seemed to me a perfect time to go skiing. I packed my skis and equipment in my car and set off alone, since my wife didn’t care for skiing anymore and my children had outgrown family excursions. The trip to the ski area in the Berkshires, in Western Massachusetts, took a little over two hours on the parkways and Interstates. As I expected, many others had had the same idea as I had, and there was a large crowd of fellow skiers, probably the majority of them New Yorkers and Bostonians, on the slopes that morning. As the day progressed, we all mostly managed to stay out of each other’s way as we glided down the trails, each of us trying to hold onto that sense of grace and exhilaration unique to our sport.

Lunchtime posed more of a challenge. There was only one cafeteria for the entire ski area. When I came off the cafeteria line and entered the seating area with my food tray, it took me several minutes before I finally spotted a single empty place to sit, which happened to be in the middle of a long table. Relieved, I took my seat and place at the table in the midst of a mob of fellow skiers.

Before I continue this story, I should provide some background information for those of you who’ve never experienced skiing. The feeling of being in a crowd at a ski slope is a bit different from being in other sorts of crowds, say those on a busy subway platform or a sidewalk in Midtown at rush hour. People skiing together are engaged in a common pursuit, enjoying the physical activity they’re doing, and, since such enjoyment is infectious, they are more open to each other and less interested in respecting privacy and personal boundaries. If you share a seat with a stranger on the M14 Crosstown bus you may not be likely to start a conversation, but if you sit on a chairlift with the same stranger to ride to the top of a ski mountain, you almost certainly will. (For one thing, you will want to know his intended direction when the lift unloads, as it’s a fast process and you don’t want to crash into each other.) Another thing about skiing, is that it’s a sport that children and adults can participate in at pretty much the same level. Your speed going down the hill is generated by the force of gravity, not your body muscle mass, so kids can easily go as fast as their parents. And as for the grown-ups, if you happen to fall off your skis and roll around a bit in the snow, well, it’s a soft landing and a little like being a child again.

So, as I began eating lunch, I could not help tuning into the animated conversations that were going on around me. I focused especially on a couple of skiers sitting directly across the table from me, a young mother and her daughter, perhaps 9 years of age. Their conversation was particularly lively, and interrupted by gales of shared laughter. The daughter was recapping their experiences of the morning, asking repeatedly “Did you see when this happened?” and then recounting a particular tumble or brief moment of being airborne, or some other event that brought unexpected glee. I became completely absorbed, taking in this joyful interaction, and sensing the underlying beautiful, loving relationship of this mother and her child. It made me think of all the times when my sons were that age, and we skied and played together in the snow, and how I missed those times now that they were grown men.

For perhaps five minutes I remained fixed on the conversation across the table, and mulled over the private memories it kindled in me. Then, at one point, I sensed that the mother had become aware of my presence, probably also that I had been listening for some time, and I felt I should say something to her, offer a sheepish apology of some sort for my eavesdropping. I looked up from my tray, directly at her, but before I could utter a word, she said to me, “So, Dr. Smith, how are you enjoying the day?”

For a second I was in shock. Then it came to me: this is someone I know. Someone that in fact I know very well. This is E___ H___, a surgeon on the staff of St. Vincent’s Hospital, my employer of the last decade. We had interacted many times as professionals. How could I have spent most of my lunchtime seeing her and listening to her speak and yet failed to recognize her as someone I knew and properly greet her? Now I needed to offer an apology, not for eavesdropping, but for failing to recognize her as a friend and colleague. I just gave her what I felt to be the truth of the matter: I had been so absorbed in experiencing the beautiful relationship she had with her daughter that I just hadn’t taken in the details that would have told me she was someone I knew. I didn’t try to blame it on our being in a different setting and being dressed differently. The momentary awkwardness of the situation quickly passed, I replied that I too was enjoying the skiing immensely, the daughter and I were introduced, and we ultimately said our goodbyes at the cafeteria exit before returning to the slopes and our trips home.

Memories of the event continued to prick my conscience on the drive home and for some time afterward, as will usually happen when you have committed a faux pas, if not an act of downright rudeness, even though you did not have the slightest intention to do so. Was my apparent negligence a sign of cognitive decline? Did it betray an unacknowledged and subconscious sexism on my part? I finally resolved that the explanation I had given on site was probably the best explanation and stopped beating up on myself.

But I did think that there was an important lesson in the story. People are, to borrow a term from mathematics, multidimensional. As they grow into and through adult life people also grow in different directions, along different lines of personal development that are mutually incommensurable. There are different sides to a person, and one side may have nothing to do with another; seeing only one side of a person may tell you nothing at all about the other sides that are equally essential parts of them. This is perhaps something we all know intuitively, although we might not express it in such language. But it’s something we might not always remember. It’s something I forgot when I was so taken, so dazzled by seeing the mother side of E___ H____ at the cafeteria table.

What does this story, and the lesson I’ve extracted from it, have to do with our Bible readings today? Just this: both Bible passages deal with the issue of assigning rankings to people. And I believe there is a simple, straightforward relationship between ranking and human dimensionality. It is quite feasible, logical, and morally permissible to assign a rank order to human beings based on one, only one, of their many dimensions. Examples are height, alphabetical order of the first letter of the last name, computational ability, etc. The ability of humans to form effective cooperative groups with different individuals having specialized roles depends on ranking individuals according to abilities, each of which is one of their dimensions. Conversely, it is impossible to arrange any sort of ranking of individuals based on their total humanity, which is multidimensional, and to attempt to do so is morally repugnant. Examples are racism, and that particular variant of human vanity that occurs when an individual construes their rank on a single dimension like personal wealth to equate with their total human value. A person’s total humanity simply cannot be encapsulated within a single numerical score or descriptive category.

In the passage from Luke, Jesus observes his fellow guests seating themselves in places of honor – presumably this means near the seat of the host – at a Sabbath meal. He then tells them a parable, which, strangely, does not seem so much an allegory of the current situation as a nearly exact duplicate of it – guests being seated at a table at a wedding banquet. The parable harks back to and paraphrases the selection from Proverbs. Jesus then gives advice to the Sabbath host about whom he should invite to his next communal meal.

On my first reading this passage seemed shocking to me. I envisioned the Pharisees who were the guests as a swarm of self-conscious status-seekers jostling each other around as they played a sort of musical chairs, competing for the best seats in the house. I would have expected Jesus to admonish them for their pettiness and vanity, to tell them to abandon their silly squabbling and forget entirely about the seating order. Instead, he seems to be providing them with a strategy, a way of “gaming the system” to get to the most prestigious seat they’re capable of attaining!

To read the passage this way, I think, is to see it with 20th or 21st century eyes, eyes accustomed to seeing status as a dirty word, eyes influenced by Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. If you read the passage carefully, though, I think you will find there is no evidence that Jesus was expressing disapproval of the behavior of the guests, or the host, or of the idea of associating honor with the order of the seating. That Jesus chose this occasion to tell a parable suggests that he found it to be a “teaching moment”. But I think the lesson he offered was not an admonishment so much as encouragement to his listeners to raise their horizons, to widen the scope of their fellowship.

Jesus noted how the guests at the Sabbath meal chose their “places of honor”. Seating around a table is a perfect example of people being ranked along a singe dimension, and, as I argued before, a morally acceptable practice. We don’t know what the criteria were the determined any particular individual’s rank; since this was a group of Pharisees, we can guess that it may have reflected the perceived piety of the person, or perhaps his perceived wisdom, or perhaps his knowledge of the scriptures. I don’t think this detail matters to the story; what does matter, I think, is that it is the guests themselves who are choosing their seats, and that the order of seating seems to be mutually agreed upon. The second part of the passage suggests that the host repeatedly invites the same people to his events, so we can take it that all these guests have been together in this place before and may be taking their seats according to a long-established custom of theirs.

When Jesus tells the parable about the wedding banquet, he is asking the group to imagine themselves trying to arrange their seats at a venue where the rules are entirely different. A wedding is a singular occasion, and there may be many invited to attend who have never met before. One may be faced with choosing seat at a table where there are many strangers. The places of honor might be predictable – again, presumably those nearest the seats of the host and couple being celebrated – but the rule for seating might not be so obvious. And the parable makes clear that the final arbiter for seating is the host and not the guests. I believe the point Jesus makes is that in such a situation, one needs to accept placement on terms that you do not define yourself, and to accept that there may be valid reasons for another person, a person you may not know, to be honored ahead of you.

Perhaps the lesson here can be summarized as “practice humility.” But I think there is more to it than that. I think Jesus is telling us also to be open to the humanity of a stranger. Isn’t that the point of his advice to the host of the Sabbath meal – invite the poor, crippled, lame, and blind to your next banquet? Invite people you would never associate with in your customary affairs: you may discover they have dimensions to their humanity you never suspected, and from acknowledging this you will grow in your own humanity.

Let me tell you some more about Dr. E___ H___, the young woman, with her daughter, with whom I shared a place at the lunch table in the Berkshires so many winters ago. E___ had been trained in the specialty of surgery of the liver. The liver is an especially demanding area for the surgeon: it is a vital organ for life and so all operations on it must minimize loss of its tissue. It has a dense network of blood vessels and receives much of the body’s total blood flow, so controlling bleeding during surgery is essential. E___ was a leader in the team of surgeons and support staff that performed liver surgery at St. Vincent’s Hospital. It was my privilege to be a member of that support staff from time to time, and to serve under her. There were a number of the hospital’s patients, in that small, select group of sufferers of liver tumors and diseases amenable to surgical treatment, whose lives were restored by the efforts of E___ and this team. It would not be an exaggeration to say that they owed their lives, in large part, to her skills and dedication; a religiously inclined person might wish to say that she was an instrument of God, bringing his saving love to the people of our community.

It has occurred to me, when I think of all of us who were seated at that long lunch table, that I was the only one who was aware that we were sharing the table with a person who was truly extraordinary, a person committed to, and excelling in, doing God’s work. And how many times, over the years, have I been in the presence of some other group of strangers and had no way of knowing whether one of them might have been extraordinary in the same way? I think if we are alive to this possibility, that at any moment one of those around us might be one of God’s instruments, our lives are in some way made richer. On the other hand, if our thoughts are only of ourselves and our own advancement, our lives are in some way diminished. I suspect this might be what Jesus intended to tell us, when he advised the Pharisees that “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

May we keep this thought in mind as we make our way through this busy, complicated world we live in.

Amen.

#sermon #humility #parables of jesus

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fredbsmith · 3 years ago

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Audio Blog

I’ve started a blog where I will post audio of my guitar pieces:

https://fredbsmith1.tumblr.com/

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fredbsmith · 3 years ago

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A Sermon

Proverbs 8

The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old; I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be. When there were no watery depths, I was given birth, when there were no springs overflowing with water; before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was given birth, before he made the world or its fields or any of the dust of the earth. I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep, when he established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep, when he gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep his command, and when he marked out the foundations of the earth. Then I was constantly at his side. I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in his presence, rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in mankind.

2 Thessalonians 2

But we ought always to thank God for you, brothers and sisters loved by the Lord, because God chose you as first fruitsto be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. He called you to this through our gospel, that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the teachings we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter.

May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope, encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word.

Understanding Through Allegory

First Reformed Church of Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, 7-10-2022

Since I retired from medicine 9 years ago, I’ve stopped going to professional meetings and dropped my subscriptions to the specialty journals I used to read regularly. I have, though, tried to follow the medical issues that come up in the public discourse and that are discussed in the national media. There certainly have been a lot of these discussions on the air and in print since the pandemic hit us early in 2020.

One of the skills doctors are supposed to have is the ability to explain tenets of medical science to lay people, in straightforward, non-technical language – to the patients they treat and to well members of their communities who want to understand how to preserve and protect their health. Some doctors are good at this, and others not so much.

The doctors and other health professionals who are really, really good at explanations to lay people are the ones that appear on interviews in the major news media. And one thing I’ve noticed is how frequently these experts get their explanations across through the use of allegory. You know they’re about to launch an allegory when they start an answer with “It’s like…” or “It’s as if…”.

Here's an example: early in the current year, as the delta and omicron variants of covid19 were spreading in waves across the nation, an expert being interviewed on a talk show was asked to explain whether the public had been deceived by the previous, apparently overly optimistic predictions of how effective the new mRNA vaccines would be in controlling the infectiveness and virulence of the virus. To answer directly would require the listener to already have an understanding of how the human immune system reacts to vaccines and of how changes in the chemical composition of a virus affect the immune system’s response to it.

The expert in this interview instead started to portray an allegory of the immune system. The human body was represented as a nightclub and the immune system as the security team that protected the club from thieves (representing pathogens): name-checkers at the club doors (representing antibodies), who screened would-be customers trying to enter the club for names of known bad actors, and bouncers (cells of the immune system), stationed inside the club, who would eject any person who entered and then began behaving badly.

I found this allegorical picture colorful and amusing, but I was impressed also that the explanation the it led to pretty faithfully replicated the understanding of vaccine mechanisms that I had acquired in my medical training. It even occurred to me that the very same allegory, the body as nightclub, could be used to explain phenomena in diseases other than covid, which were puzzling to members of the lay public. If you remember, in the later years of the AIDS epidemic there was a complication called the “immune reconstitution syndrome” that some patients with advanced AIDS developed when highly active antiretroviral agents came into use. These patients developed severe acute symptoms on treatment, even though the AIDS virus was being destroyed and the immune system cells the virus had decimated were being restored. It was the now-reinvigorated immune response to other, secondary pathogens harbored within the bodies of these patients that caused the symptoms. But to many in the lay public, it seemed paradoxical that an effective treatment for the AIDS virus was making the patients worse. In the allegorical explanation that I dreamed up by extending the nightclub scenario, the bouncers would be returning to the nightclub as a group, after all having been out on sick leave, and, finding on their return many freeloaders peacefully relaxed, eating and drinking the club’s food and liquor without paying, would attempt to eject the entire group of bad guys en masse, breaking much of the club’s furniture in the process.

The reason allegorical explanations by experts are effective, I think, has to do with the state of mind they induce in the listener. The expert has a knowledge of his or her subject acquired through long years of study and experience, that can’t be shared instantly with lay listeners. These years of study have produced a knowledge base and patterns of disciplined thinking that have become almost intuitive for them; an expert in immunology can rely on this “enlightened intuition” to address problems that involve new variables (e.g. a new virus, as the SARS coronavirus 2 was in 2019). An expert skilled in the use of allegory seeks to reproduce a state of “enlightened intuition” in the listener by looking for explanations that involve common, everyday experience that parallel explanations in the expert’s field.

Unfortunately, explanation through allegory has its limits. An allegory can be extended, as I demonstrated with the immune reconstitution syndrome, but it can only be extended so far. What happens when we try to extend the nightclub allegory to explain the necessity of immunosuppression in patients following major organ transplants? It might go like this: the nightclub owner plans to make a major renovation of the club’s building, say a new furnace or HVAC system to replace an aging, malfunctioning unit, on a certain date. Violence will occur if the team of bouncers mistakenly take the HVAC installers for robbers. Is it sensible for the club owner to prevent this by sending the team of bouncers home for the day? Wouldn’t it be much more reasonable to inform his security staff that the installation will occur and that the individuals assigned to perform the installation will, of course, have job identification credentials? Of course it would. The allegory has stopped working at this point, because it fails to model the actual range of options we have for modulating the immune system.

The Bible texts we read today reflect on God, and God’s relationship to us and our lives, in two allegories. In one, from Thessalonians, God is the father who loves and nurtures us; in the other, from Proverbs, God is the design engineer who has fashioned our universe according to his wise intentions.

We recognize the allegorical nature of these portraits in they both a render a subject that is sublimely mysterious, probably beyond human understanding, in images that come from common experience.

We can readily see the limitations in each of these allegories. Our fathers protect and care for us when we are young, but in the course of our lives we see them become older and frail, and we eventually lose them. We therefore understand God to be allegorically the father we had as a child and not the man he became in later life.

In our currently technically advanced world, we have become used to seeing that a great many major construction projects have incorporated serious flaws at the design stage – think of the Titanic or the Tacoma Narrows Bridge – to the extent that we see errors in design, and the correction of errors that follows in later projects, as a learning process, inherent in the design profession. We certainly don’t see the wisdom, power, and creativity of God as having been acquired through correcting previous errors.

We can see also that the understanding we get from the two allegories is different. One emphasizes God’s love and nurture, the other his wisdom and power. We might even be tempted to think they are contradictory, in that no contemporary adult attributes exceptional power and wisdom to the father they know and love (not many, anyway) and vanishingly few of us have loving relationships with the designers of the buildings, bridges, and cars our lives depend upon. I believe we should recognize, however, that all allegories are inherently limited, and we should expect that no single allegorical representation can tell us the whole truth about a vast subject. I believe the Bible gives us both of these allegories, because either one or the other may provide the most meaningful understanding of our relationship with God at a particular time, as we progress through the course of our lives.

Let’s look a little more closely at the father – or perhaps we should say “parent” allegory. This is my favorite of the two, because I think it is the one that better utilizes our own life experience to deepen our understanding. We have all had intensely close relationships with our parents in our early life. Many of us have parented children of our own, so we have seen the parent-child relationship from both sides, and we have gained a better understanding of our own childhood from raising our children. We understand intuitively the philosophical statement that we have our existence through our parents. We understand from biology that our bodies, at the time we were conceived, were formed from parts of our parents; we are literally of one substance with them. We’ve also learned that the cellular events leading to our conception could have produced many different combinations of our parents’ genes; there were literally millions of alternate versions of ourselves that could have come into existence instead of us. And we know, intuitively, that our parents did not select us during this process, that they would have loved any alternate version of ourselves as intensely as they loved us. Theirs was a love that was truly unconditional, a love that came into being before we, in fact, came into being. And so we can think that this is the kind of love in which God holds us.

The designer allegory works differently. We may not actually know any design engineers or architects first hand, but we make regular, day-to-day use of their creations – like cars and buildings. In a sense, we carry on an anonymous relationship with these people by incorporating their products in our lives. Our responses to them, to their works, take two forms: admiration, or even awe, for the positive qualities in their works – beauty, ingenuity, simplicity, user-friendliness, etc. – or criticism for the opposite qualities. Most of the time, I think, we criticize them for having produced something that doesn’t work the way we think it ought to. When we do this, we are implicitly placing ourselves in a peer-to-peer relationship with the designer, although we may not realize it consciously. When I am frustrated by a design problem in my car, I feel anger toward the person I imagine to be responsible for it. I imagine that I myself could have had his job, if I had studied engineering instead of medicine, and, in his place, I would never come up with such a stupid design for car. (Sound familiar?)

So the designer allegory works completely differently than the parent allegory. The parent allegory leads us to understand God as being like the parents we know from personal experience. The designer allegory leads us to understand God as being totally unlike the designers in our personal experience. The works of human designers are all subject to criticism from those willing to presume equal footing with those designers; God’s one work, the universe in its totality from the beginning of time, is not. What is the alternative for comparison? What is the alternative … to all that there is? Who among us humans would have the brainpower to imagine this? It would seem an act of hubris, perhaps blasphemy in the eyes of some, to assume equality in relationship to God, to take on the role of God’s critic. I have just argued that it’s also illogical.

When we try to think through the designer allegory, we find, paradoxically, that we have come to understand that God is beyond human understanding. From it, we understand only what God is not. So we might call it an “inverse allegory,” or an “anti-allegory.” It leads us to a place where we regard God as being at a vast distance from us, light-years away, at the edge of the universe, and our only response can be contemplation in awe and silence. Perhaps this is place we need to visit, from time to time, as we proceed on our spiritual journey.

From time to time.

There are other times in our lives, inevitable times, when circumstances deal us a terrible blow. Loss or serious illness of one dearly loved, or an illness that threatens our own life, can make us feel like our heart has been torn from our body. In the grip of such pain, we may feel anger toward God. You may hear the person suffering express a wish to hold God accountable for what has happened to them. I have two reactions when I hear this: as a cri de cœur, it vividly expresses the depth of the experienced pain, and I must respect this form of its meaning. But I cannot accept it as literal spiritual insight. It seems to me a misuse of the designer allegory, and an assumption, albeit unconscious, that one can presume equal footing with God and pronounce judgment upon him. It contradicts the lesson of the Book of Job, that contemplation of God’s workings in the world can only be done in silence and awe.

Such times, I believe, call for us to seek comfort in the other allegory we’ve been talking about. We are diminished by our pain, and we feel helpless and powerless over our condition. Doesn’t it make sense for us to remember those times when we were small children, when we knew no state other than being weak and helpless in a world of adults, and, when injured and in pain we would run to the arms of our parents, to seek comfort basking in the warmth of their unlimited love? They didn’t know us in every conceivable detail, they hadn’t crafted us, and we didn’t know, either, how much they knew about us; but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that we could trust that they loved us unconditionally and would do everything in their power to help us heal.

Can we, at this stage of our adult lives, come into the arms of God, the father, in the same frame of mind, to ease our suffering?

May it be so.

Amen.

#sermon #allegory #theodicy

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fredbsmith · 3 years ago

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A Materialistic View of Christian Theology and the Church

Human beings find meaning for their lives in community with others. A common view is that in the realm of the arts, a community of individuals seeking meaning for their lives is held together by a shared experience of beauty, and, in the realm of religion a seeking community is united by a shared set of beliefs and rules.

Although I think most people would tend to agree with the foregoing statement, it does not explain what has drawn me to a life of committed membership in a mainline Protestant church. As I outlined in my previous post, I cannot actually believe some of the fundamental tenets modern churches would seem to consider sacrosanct – such as the existence of an immortal, immaterial soul in each human being, which is the center of personal consciousness and which leaves the body intact at death. Rather, I find in the experience of Christian worship that the biblical narratives, and the depictions of Jesus, resonate with something deep inside me, a kind of resonance that occurs also when I listen to the music I love. Through this resonance, I feel I properly belong to the worshipping community, even though I struggle with the fact that membership in a church has traditionally required avowal of a prescribed set of belief statements, some of which I find implausible. In other words, my attraction to the church seems more like the kind of attraction that draws people to the arts rather than a stereotypical religious inclination.

My struggle with church doctrines has led me to examine the ways they can be reconciled with the materialistic view of life and death that I outlined in a previous post. This requires understanding them as allegorical rather than as literally true objective statements.

The soul of the individual human being, as I see it, is the conscious, experiencing, self-aware self, generated thorough the activity of the nervous system, itself a complex, highly organized collection of particles of matter, each particle inherently possessing properties enabling its participation in the processes of life. The soul, in brief, is not itself a material object, but a functional state which arises from a particular arrangement of particles of matter. I would thus characterize my soul as the subjective convergence of the fundamental particles of matter that collectively compose my body.

I understand God to be the subjective convergence of all the fundamental particles of the universe, taking into account that all particles of matter can generate life. This is a pantheistic viewpoint; I don’t see God as a craftsman standing outside the universe he has fashioned. I see God as a living being embodied in the entirety of all that is real, and that all of us are a (small) part of his being.

A corollary of this conjecture is that the truths of the natural world, the laws of physics and the emergent natural sciences, can be understood to have a sacred character. A viable theology should not contradict natural laws whose truth has been demonstrated by science.

I understand universal human fallibility, the fall of Adam, unavoidable sin, and the risk of falling into evil, to be consequences of the self-serving actions taken by individuals in attempting to evade the death that awaits them, a view I have taken from the works of Ernest Becker. Each of us is biologically programmed to preserve our own living body – to preserve the boundaries that separate our bodies from the rest of the material world – above all else. While we live, we can no more escape our innate self-centeredness than we can escape the death that will ultimately claim us.

I understand the project of seeking meaning in our lives, of finding fulfillment, as the attempt to bring our understanding of ourselves, and of aligning our aims and the actions we take, with the life processes going on outside of ourselves, in the human community and in the world at large, the world which is itself the embodiment of God. (Allusions to this attitude can be seen, I believe, when Christians considering specific courses of action, ask themselves, “What choice would God want me to make?” or “What would Jesus do?”) In looking outward to a community, to other beings of our own sort, it becomes easier to free our ourselves from the hold our own death has upon us. We lose our self-centeredness as individuals by merging our own subjectivity with that of our community. Paradoxically, this is made easier if we first come to terms with the reality of our own death, so that what we pursue is not some surrogate for eternal life (power, fame, wealth, etc.), but genuine flourishing in the limited lifetimes allotted to us, and whose boundedness we acknowledge.

I understand the expression “body of Christ” in Christian writings as a metaphor for the community of human beings seeking meaning for their lives through the Christian project, and expressions referring to the bodily components of Jesus, his blood and his flesh, as metaphoric extensions of this idea in poetic representations of the function of the community. The material grounding of these metaphors is striking.

Explaining the Appeal of Christianity

I believe a striking allegorical consonance can be drawn between the material view of life and death I have been developing here, and the materialistic presentation of Jesus’s death, resurrection, and divinity in early Christian thought, as expressed in the letters of Paul and the other epistle writers.

Although the ancients had generally considered immortality to be a defining characteristic of any being called a god, Jesus, whose divinity is acknowledged, not only dies during the course of the biblical narratives, but his death is central to his story. (As, we are told by Ernest Becker, our thoughts of our own death are central to our own psychological makeup.) Jesus is mortal, like us, and we know and experience him through being united with him in death.

The Jesus narrative not only holds a mirror to our own existence, but it redefines our concept of death’s meaning. Following death, Jesus is reunited with God, just as following our own physical deaths the components of our bodies rejoin the substance of the external world.

The gospels portray the resurrected Jesus as fully physical and embodied. And Paul speaks of the resurrection to come, during the end times, in terms of physical bodies. (Regrettably, to me, in later periods Christian theologians began to view souls as having existence separable from the body, along the lines of Platonic dualism, and the later dualism of Descartes. But this is not inherent in the original words of scripture, at least as I read them.)

Jesus is presented in the scriptures as a being who had life as an embodied human, and who is also one with God. I understand this to mean, in the language of materialism, that the human Jesus had a psychological constitution that was in complete harmony with the life-giving constitution of the universe, and was therefore a faithful representation of the eternal God manifested in human flesh. Jesus himself continues to have life eternal, in that his words and thoughts are preserved in the minds of men, and that his drive to promote and affirm life persists throughout the material universe, where he can be said to be both presently living and one with God.

A Criticism of the Church and Christian Theology in History

Three factors led to the corruption of the Christian project, with the result that churches of all denominations are widely scorned by educated people in today’s world.

(1) The intense, universal appeal of the Christian message, and its “viral” dissemination among the people of the Roman empire in its later years, including gentiles, led to its adoption as a tool for social control by political rulers in Europe during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, beginning with the Roman emperor Constantine. Individuals could be dissuaded from robbing and committing other crimes of violence against their neighbors if they believed this would endanger their salvation; to the extent this belief became widespread, people were more likely to live peaceably within larger and larger neighborhoods. This in turn fostered economic development within political units that subscribed to Christianity and to increasing prosperity in these regions.

The regrettable downside of its political acceptance was assumption of political power by Church officials. The leaders of the Church began to function like secular rulers, using their positions to dominate the members of their flocks, viewing subjugation of the wills of their people as legitimate rights of their offices, and viewing themselves as in control of the salvation of those whose care was entrusted to them. Even in today’s world, after the unspeakable violence of the Christian sectarian wars of the 17th Century led to the political disempowerment of the Church, many educated people continue to regard the Church as a coercive element within society.

(2) In pursuing the laudable goal of subjecting the Christian tenets to critical analysis, and reconciling them with then-current knowledge from the sciences and humanities, the Church’s theology in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages became infused with dualistic concepts from Greek philosophy that were not present in the original scriptures. The resulting hybrid of ideas about immaterial souls leaving “corruptible” bodies at death, traveling to heaven where they enjoy a static, immaterial (Platonic) state of existence, and then rejoining new bodies to re-emerge as active, physically embodied beings on the Day of Judgment, is a confusing mish-mash of a narrative that is not faithful to what is written in the Bible, and that lacks the clarity and visceral-level engagement of the original story. It seems to dismiss the serious reality of Death for the individual contemplating the significance of his life. I also do not believe it can be seen as allegorically consonant with current tenets of human biology and psychology. Yet this is the story-book picture of humanity’s place in the universe that most members of today’s educated class believe to be held and promoted by the Church, and they dismiss it as naïve superstition.

(3) The original scriptures contain some passages that are inherently unbelievable, some that are cryptic, and some that contradict other scriptural passages. (Consider the virgin birth, the odd and abbreviated account of the star of Bethlehem in Matthew’s gospel, the differing timelines of John and the synoptic gospels, the difference in the genealogies of Jesus in Luke and Matthew, the discrepancies in descriptions of the death of Judas Iscariot by Matthew and Acts, etc., etc.). A portion of these may reflect errors that were introduced and replicated during multiple generations of hand-copying the texts. But I suspect that at least some of these were present in the originals, and that the compilers of the writings in the process leading to the creation of the canon were aware of their existence and the problems they engendered, but felt compelled to preserve them anyway. This suggests to me that the compilers expected that future readers would bring their own reasoning and judgment into their study of scripture, as they attempted to resolve contradictions and explain unclear language. Such an attitude in approaching scripture was later formalized and promoted by the Scholastics. One would expect readers from any particular period of history to bring the knowledge they have from their secular studies, and from general life experience, to their interpretations of scripture as well.

Unfortunately, the present day has seen a backlash against the incorporation of religious thought into our educational programs and public discourse. This again probably has resulted from the immense societal trauma of the European religious wars. Although theology continues to be pursued within academia and among scholars professionally committed to it, it is no longer considered a proper subject for children in the system of public education. (Separation of church and state, after all!) The question of what one should do to have a meaningful life, how one is to flourish in the years between entry into adulthood and death, is off limits in the classroom and is regarded as an intensely personal private matter – to be discussed, if at all, only at home and with one’s close family. The regrettable result is that this is a subject that is hardly discussed at all, and that current knowledge from human psychology and biology is never brought to bear on the contradictions and ambiguities that lie in the messages of the biblical scriptures. Wrestling with the interpretive problems they pose might otherwise be sources of wisdom for all of us in the living of our lives.

An Example of How the Exclusion of Religious Thinking from our Public Discourse Fails Us

The United States is currently experiencing an epidemic of gun violence, manifested most visibly and dramatically by frequent mass shootings of school children.

The arguments about the best response for public action are varied, but seem to be uniformly based on estimates of what will best preserve the full lifespans of the most people – whether having more guns in the hands of well-meaning people capable of defending the innocent potential victims, or making fewer guns available to malicious people, will save the most lives. Much heated rhetoric is expended on defending one of the other of these two contradictory lines of thought. Discussions in the media are filled with charts and tables of data speaking to this point. Do these charts and tables change anyone’s mind on this issue? I’m not sure.

What if we thought about the problem of promoting availability of guns in a different way, the way in which it affects the mindset, the soul, if you will, of the person who is possessed of a gun: a gun, carried on one’s person, is essentially a portable tool enabling any one to kill, effortlessly, any other person he or she encounters, regardless of any factor that might otherwise be an obstacle – the size, strength, dexterity, etc. of the person encountered vs. those same characteristics in you. The gun has no other purpose. The gun you carry as you mingle with other people in public spaces thus confers enormous power upon you – to think that every stranger who comes into your field of vision, whose visage might otherwise prompt you to ask yourself whether this is someone who is worthy of your respect, perhaps a potential friend worthy of your affection, someone you might want to extend a friendly greeting to – is someone who you are now aware you could kill with only the slightest amount of exertion. But of course, you wouldn’t think of doing that unless he threatened your life first. So, to justify the legitimacy of the power you now hold over such a person, your vision of him has to include how much of a threat he is to you. Does he also have a gun in his pocket? Would he use it on you before you had a chance to defend yourself by killing him? How would you feel about yourself if you killed him first – justifiably of course – before he got the chance to reach for his gun?

Is this this the way you would like to live your life, constantly aware of the possibility of being killed or taking another person’s life, as you commute to your place of work or otherwise traverse public places and mix with other human beings? Ask yourself, would this day-to-day experience, in the long run, play a role in shaping your heart? Does this make for what you would consider a full and meaningful life? Is this how people should engage in community life, everyone carrying guns hidden on their person and always ready to snuff out the life of another, always in fear themselves of sudden violent death by gunfire?

I have never encountered an argument against wide public dissemination of guns in these terms in the public media.

And that makes me very sad.

#materialism #Christian materialism #gun rights

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fredbsmith · 3 years ago

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Some thoughts on Life and Death

Can a materialistic view of life and death provide a source of inspiration? Of comfort?

I find I cannot choose what I believe; some things strike me as believable and others not. The world presents its own truths, and I have integrity to the extent that my beliefs align with these truths and honesty to the extent that I openly avow them.

I cannot accept the concept of an immaterial human soul. I cannot believe that my conscious self will survive my bodily death. A life of reading and thinking about science, and my life’s work as a physician and pathologist, tells me this is no more than wishful thinking, and wishing for it does not make it true.

I do find it believable that human minds are functional states of human bodies and brains, i.e. that they are generated by matter. A highly persuasive neuroscientific argument supporting this belief is presented by Mark Solms in The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. It follows that death and ensuing disintegration of the body and brain will result in the irreversible extinction of individual consciousness.

Must this strike terror in all of us, as we contemplate the deaths that inevitably await each of us? Perhaps it must, but I also think it’s possible to extricate ourselves from this state if we contemplate two additional consequences of the materialistic viewpoint.

(1) Life is inchoate in matter at all levels, down to fundamental forces and particles.

A living organism, Solms tells us, is a self-regulating system of chemically interacting material structures, which has sequestered itself from the rest of the material world, and whose operating system prioritizes its own survival, i.e. its continued sequestration from the world at large. The molecules composing the living organism, forming its cells, fluids, and supporting matrices, do not differ chemically or physically from their counterpart molecules in the inanimate world external to the organism. In fact, as part of the life process, there is a constant, bidirectional traffic of single molecules between the interior of the organism and the external world, even as the interacting system of molecules comprising the organism remains collectively sequestered from the external world.

Those who have studied science are comfortable with the idea that the calcium, iron, and other minerals in our bodies are the same substances found in terrestrial rocks. From astronomy, we know that the ultimate origin of these elements in our bodies is to be found in supernovae explosions which occurred early in the history of the universe, outside our solar system. The substances composing us had existence long before we came into being, and will endure long after we are gone.

The chemistry of these substances that make up our bodies is not affected by whether their presence is within living organisms (within the biosphere) or in the inorganic matter making up the remainder of the universe. A compelling argument can be made that the rules governing these chemical interactions of matter are determined by the laws of quantum physics that characterize atoms, even though rigorous formal mathematical descriptions of the atomic nuclei and electron shells that would predict behavior in chemical interactions have not been extended to atoms beyond hydrogen; the complexities of the equations that would be required to explain the chemical interactions of larger atoms are beyond our current physics. Nonetheless, most physicists believe that the laws of chemistry are inherent in, and engendered by, the laws of quantum mechanics applied to particular classes of atoms*.

As a believer in the method and mission of the sciences, I can accept ideas that are plausible in view of evidence generated by legitimate scientific inquiry, even if they cannot be deduced or calculated precisely from established scientific laws or observations. So I can accept that the physics of atoms, and the particles that make up the atoms, determine the way atoms interact chemically, and determine other properties of matter, such as its macroscopic physical states (solid, liquid, gas). This seems reasonable to me, even if not deducible from observations of single fundamental particles in cloud chambers and particle accelerators.

It seems to me only a short step to extrapolate this idea, using the framework provided by Solms’s work, to a concept of living organisms; that the tendency of certain molecules, within certain environments and in certain proportions, to aggregate and sequester themselves in hierarchical arrangements that constitute separate individual beings, can be traced back, ultimately, to the nature of the atoms, and fundamental subatomic particles, that have the inherent potential to give rise to life.

Science does not give us a full, comprehensive picture of reality; the truths that it gives us are limited, scattered, and imprecise – samplings, at best, of the full reality. But whatever vision we form of the full reality must be compatible with the hard truths generated by science, if it is to be believable. I find the concept of the potential for life indwelling in all matter to be such a vision.

(2) Individual death is the merging of the previously sequestered, self-regulating, matter-based system comprising the individual being into the substance of the universe at large.

Organismic death is ultimately the collapse of the partition that separates the organism, constituted as a self-contained, self-regulated internal physical system, from the world at large. Its material constituents rejoin those of the environment and are swept up into the ongoing, ceaseless chemical and physical reactions of the environment.

The environment, the system that is rejoined at death, teems with activity at the molecular level: the chemical and physical reactions, the movements and transformations of molecules, some within the multitude of other living organisms, and many others in inanimate matter as well.

The cellular and molecular processes that follow immediately upon organismic death, which we label dissolution and decay, are repugnant to us. This is because the sensory impact of these processes carried on at length is a such a strong reminder of the idea of death in our collective imagination. Our imaginations overlook that these same chemical reactions have been constantly at work in our bodies since we first came to exist; much of the energy our bodies expend during life are consumed by metabolic reactions that counteract natural dissolution, that reconstitute the molecular components of our cells. From the viewpoint of chemistry, death is no more a stranger to us than is our environment.

The idea of death repels us because the sequestered, self-regulating system that constitutes our being prioritizes self-preservation above all other activities. Self-preservation, from the materialist perspective, means preservation of the barrier surrounding the organism, separating it from its environment. Maintaining the sequestered status equates to survival. Prioritizing sequestration is universal among biological organisms because of Darwinian logic; organisms selected for in the process of evolution are those most successful at isolating their internal systemic constituents from their environment. In organisms like ourselves, with conscious mental activity, prioritizing survival (sequestration from the environment) leads to a negative affective mental state associated with loss of the sequestered status.

Eternal life is a reasonable concept.

The fundamental particles that constitute ordinary matter – of which our bodies are composed – are, practically speaking, eternal**.

It is therefore reasonable to say that the ultimate constituents our bodies will endure forever, even if the complex, hierarchical arrangement of those constituents, which form our particular bodies and generate our particular conscious selves, will not.

Is this a comforting thought? If it is only our conscious mind and our memories that hold meaning for us, and which will inevitably disappear at death, perhaps not. If we reflect on the material elements of our bodies as each harboring the potential for life, that collectively gave us the life that was so dear to us, and that may give life to another being as they recirculate through the world for all eternity – then perhaps so.

This is the complete opposite of the view held by the Platonists, who held that material objects were transient and immaterial ideals eternal, and hence maintained belief in an immortal, immaterial soul. It is a concept that I find untenable in view of the results of modern science.

The self-preservation paradox

The overriding demand for self-preservation at the core of our being, which motivates much of our actions throughout life, inevitably colors the thoughts we have about our own deaths. Ernest Becker argues persuasively that the individual’s fear of his own death is the most potent motivator of human behavior, and that it explains much of human psychology (in Denial of Death) and human history (Escape from Evil).

Thinking about one’s own death induces a state of cognitive dissonance. Our conscious minds have evolved to enable us to adapt to rapidly occurring, unpredictable changes in our environment (Solms), i.e. to survive. Survival is, ultimately, the purpose of all the thinking we do (Becker). To hold death in the center of out thoughts for any length of time, and for any reason other than to escape it, goes against our grain.

It seems to me that one can best endure this kind of contemplation by focusing one’s thoughts not on escaping death, but on escaping the constricting viewpoint of one’s own subjectivity. Our mental life is generated by the input from our senses and is inevitably biased by the location of our own body in space and time; but at higher, more abstract levels of thinking, we can expand our viewpoint to encompass the world at large. We can aspire to a view in which the importance of our own survival diminishes when measured against the dimensions of the universe and the eons it has existed and will continue to exist.

I think this mental task is made easier if we keep ourselves aware of the life-generating capacity of all matter. And of the enormously arbitrary way each of us came to exist, to occupy our own little sector of the universe’s matter – through the union of one particular ovum and one particular sperm cell – and of the millions of alternative versions of us, of other beings that never came into existence, had other fusions of our parents’ ova and sperms occurred. Imagine the seemingly unbounded possible versions of humanity at large, looking back over the generations that humans have been on earth. The life each of us now has is a freak accident, the odds against it at the dawn of our species probably billions (or more) to one.

Each of the possible versions of the human population that might have existed over man’s history would have involved a different configuration of all the molecules and atoms that composed those myriads of human bodies. Against this backdrop, how significant is the flux of molecules of my body into the surrounding universe that will occur when I die?

Further thoughts

I have suggested here that results of science can aid in getting outside one’s self-centered subjectivity, facilitating the contemplation of the meaning of one’s existence and death. I believe this goal is similar to that of certain schools of meditation; I’m not sufficiently familiar with their literature or practice to comment further.

I also believe that the ideas I have presented here are reflected in some ways in elements of Christian theology. I hope to explore this in future posts.

*Discussed by the particle physicist Steven Weinberg in “Can Science Explain Everything? Anything?” in The New York Review of Books, May 31, 2001.

**Protons are stable under all conditions. Neutrons decay in isolation but are stable within atomic nuclei.

#materialism #Christian materialism #death

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