A Return Home Through Old Florida
I just returned yesterday from
an overnight trip to Tallahassee. I had taken my 87 year old Dad up to see his
92 year old sister, Aunt Delphine. It was a good visit with lots
of stories, trips to a seafood restaurant they both like and a late brunch (during which my aunt sneaked most of her food onto my plate) before we left Saturday afternoon. It was good to spend time with one of only
two remaining siblings of my parents. And it was good to spend time alone with
my Dad.
We had taken the monotonous,
heavily traveled interstate route (75 north to 10 west) going up. It is
probably the fastest route to Tallahassee even when closed down by accidents as
it was Friday afternoon just east of Live Oak. Coming home we took the more
leisurely route from pre-interstate days following US 27 to Perry and then US 19
south. We crossed the Suwanee River at Fanning Springs continuing south through
Cross City, Chiefland, Gulf Hammock and finally swerved eastward across the back
road through tiny Morriston to Ocala and the interstate.
It was a beautiful drive
through an as yet unspoiled part of Florida. It still looks much like the state
I knew as a boy which no longer exists much of anywhere else. The
undeveloped hammock lands along the northern Gulf Coast are vibrantly green and
full of wildlife. Outside the towns, there are very few houses or businesses.
Occasionally you see an unfortunate coyote and armadillo who met their ends on
the highway there. But for long stretches you don’t even see billboards or any
other signs that humans had been there other than the highway.
It was good to spend time
with my Dad, talking about family history, about his hopes for us children and about what he wants to happen
once he has left us. I always come away with a greater sense of who I am and
how I got to be the way I am after these long trips with my father.
Dream Lecturer
Apparently this time
together stirred up a lot more than I realized. This morning, I awoke from a dream about a lecture of sorts. It was unclear who the lecturer was but I found myself
listening intently. The points are not terribly profound, indeed they are
somewhat reductionist as you will see, but I think they are worth considering. Undoubtedly,
they reflect my conscious understandings of this subject quite well.
To wit:
The lecturer said, ”There is no human evil which cannot
be redeemed. There is no human goodness which cannot be corrupted. Human beings
lie at the Big Bend of those two potentials.”
And then I awoke.
It is my habit to record my
dreams upon waking. Carl Jung believed that our unconscious mind speaks to us
in our dreams and has important things to tell us if we are willing to listen. My
dreams have always been vibrant, active (so much so that I sometimes awake
exhausted from the activity in my dream) and vivid. I almost always remember at
least one of the dreams from the night before when I awake in the morning. I
guess my unconscious mind tends to be as communicative as its conscious
portion.
Interestingly, in my dream,
the junction of these two potentials was referred to as “the Big Bend” of humanity. The
Big Bend is a geographical designation of the curving coastline on the northern
Gulf Coast where the Floridian peninsula attaches to the North American
mainland and the state takes a 90 degree westward turn to form its boomerang
shape. This was the very region my father and I had crossed the day before.
A Mixed Bag on a Good Day
As I lay in bed this morning
mulling over my dream with its lecture on the mixed nature of human beings, gradually coming to full consciousness, the
following considerations occurred to me:
Human nature is a mixed bag on a good day. This is why
theologies of depravity always have the potential to reinforce, exacerbate,
even insure the very evil they most fear. It is also why theologies of human
goodness always have the potential to be disappointed and to cause unintended
harm in their naiveté.
Years ago in graduate school
at FSU I encountered William James and his work on the varieties of religious
experience. I found his descriptions of the sin-sick souls in search of
conversion and the sanguine souls seeking to develop their positive visions of the
divine helpful in understanding the religions I was studying. In all honesty, I
found much more to like in the sanguine soul than the sin-sick alternative
which I really have never understood. But increasingly, I find these constructs
too reductionist to be terribly helpful, especially when seen as dichotomous
choices.
The reality is that most of
us experience ourselves as having aspects of both tendencies. While depravity
theologies emphasize human sinfulness and their Freudian versions emphasize our
destructive tendencies, the reality is that the potential for depravity has
never been exhaustive of the subject of human nature. On the other hand, the
innate goodness theologies that often developed in response to the brooding
Augustinian visions which unfortunately became dominant in the west have often proven
incapable of dealing with the evil that does arise regularly in our world.
Murder, war and theft are considered
news by most human beings because they are the exception to the human
experience, not the rule. But they do happen. And any vision of humanity that
fails to take into account those possibilities is bound to be ambushed by its
destructive potential. Such possibilities are not simply remediated by
education as post-Enlightenment thinkers wished to believe. Rather they reside
in the shadow of the human psyche and erupt when we least expect them. Indeed,
some of humanity’s worst behaviors have occurred in the name of good intentions
carried out with a blind eye to their actual impacts on others.
On the other hand, if you
anticipate depravity you won’t have much trouble finding it. Indeed, there is
something to be said for the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. In the American
Bible Belt, the area of the country most prone to see the world through
depravity lenses, the social pathologies from divorce and abuse to murder and addictions
tend to be the highest in the country. Conversely, the areas of the country
with the lowest religious participation rates generally tend to have among the
lowest incidence of social pathologies. Might it be that we humans simply live
into others’ expectations of us?
But Are We Willing?
As I lay in bed this
morning, trying to convince myself I should get up, make coffee and get ready
to go to church, a last stray thought ran through my mind:
Becoming more fully human requires two things: one, the ongoing
willingness to work at becoming conscious and two, the ongoing willingness to
work at overcoming our tendencies to be selfish, tribal and anthropocentric. We
are inevitably works in progress. We are learning how to hold in tension all of
our potentialities, all of who we are. All of us can become ever more fully
human. The question is never about capacity; rather, it is always about whether
we are willing.
Perhaps I ought to go on
road trips with my Dad more often.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., M.Div., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar
(inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church
(Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Asst. Lecturer: Humanities,
Religion, Philosophy of Law
Osceola Campus, University
of Central Florida, Kissimmee
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an
unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production
in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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