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Bonds That
Make Us Free, Part 18: The Light Beckons Always
by
C. Terry Warner
Atunement
of Souls
We
are constantly receiving signals from others that reveal something
of their needs and hopes and fears. Martin Buber expressed this
idea in these words: "Living means being addressed." We
are called upon by others' unspoken requests, expressed in their
faces and gestures and voices, to treat them with consideration
and respect.
Recall the mother
we read about in Part 3 who
felt she could not keep from criticizing her sloppy teenage daughter.
Very likely the message that addressed her was not "Don't scold
her; listen to her." More probably that message seemed to come
from the girl herself: "Don't scold me, Mother; listen to me!"
To be a person in a family or community is to pick up from others
such gently expressed imperatives as these. As we observed in Part
3, in large measure our humanity consists in our ability to
sense and respect and respond to the humanity of others.
We should mark
this point well. The part of our nature that is sensitive to the
reality of others makes possible both our deepest sorrows and our
deepest joys. It is by this capacity that we are able to attune
ourselves one to another, soul to soul, and bond together in friendship,
love, and loyalty, or else turn one another into enemies and bond
ourselves to each other by suspicion and fear. The second, discordant
bonding is the bondage of anxiety and strife and helplessness in
which we self-betrayers get ourselves emotionally stuck. The first,
resonant bonding is freedom from all that discord and suffocating
self-worry.
One summer our
family drove to our friend Bob Amott's cabin on the Snake River
in Idaho for our vacation. On the way we sang together for what
seemed like hours: "Barges" and "Mrs. O'Leary"
and the Jell-O commercial and a couple of dozen other rounds, faster
and louder and more creatively with every mile that passed. Nobody
got tired. What stopped our singing was someone's saying, "Anybody
remember the time when . . . ?" Invariably Matthew's recollections
were the funniest because he could remember every detail of everything
that had ever happened to him and could mimic all the people in
the story. The windows were down because the station wagon wasn't
air-conditioned, and all the children had their feet out to feel
the breeze around their ankles and through their toes. I could tell
that Susan had freed her mind of the lists of doings that preoccupied
her at home, and I thought, "This is exactly how it's supposed
to be."
What does it
take to achieve such emotional intimacy? The fundamental ingredient
is an awakening of each individual to the others and a willing effort
to respond without any personal agenda in exactly the way that seems
most right, considerate, and helpful. Susan had opened herself to
a lively gratitude for the closeness we were all feeling for one
another—even though, to her embarrassment, we had left the flowerbed
by our front stairs still unplanted. I had tossed overboard my worries
about the work deadline I would not meet, as if they were baggage
too heavy for the trip. Andrea was not thinking about Cassie's having
broken her water-color box that very morning; diffident and cautious
though she was, she accepted and appreciated her rambunctious little
sister without any reservation. And when Tim leaned his head on
Emily's shoulder and later draped his legs across her lap—invasions
of her space that had thrown her into a tizzy on other occasions—she
did not find him the least bit annoying, but instead became his
older and wiser sponsor and read him stories when the others slept.
No one expressed appreciation out loud—indeed, I may have been the
only one thinking how happy and perfect was this day—but for each
of us the others mattered more than defending our individual rights
and ensuring our personal comfort. The profound sense of connection
we felt one to another that summer's day would not have been possible
except for the capacity in each of us to sense one another's inward
yearnings, fears, and love.
Conscience
and Truth
What happens, then, when we fall into self-betrayal and ruin
this attunement? What becomes of our connections with one another
when we lodge ourselves obstinately within our individual boxes?
Do we close ourselves off from such connections entirely? If so,
what hope have we of emerging from the condition that Black Elk
called "the darkness of our eyes"? To answer these questions
we need to learn a little more about conscience and its relation
to the signals that flow to us from other beings.
The Light
That Comes from Others
In Part 3, we spoke of
the indications always available from others, guiding us in how
we ought to treat them. If we are at all observant, we usually have
a pretty good sense of other people's state of mind—for example,
whether they are angry, distressed, or glad about their present
situation—and this guides us quite well in how we should act toward
them and what we ought to say. Tim's head snuggled on Emily's lap
and the contentment on his face showed her quite clearly what she
could do to please and reassure him. She needed no special training
to understand how laying her arm across his chest and talking with
him about the party at her friend's house would affect him; this
was a know-how she had already acquired as part of living with others
during her fourteen years of life.
We need some
names for the signals that come to us from others without any special
effort on their part. We might speak of receiving a prompting or
summons, of sensing an imperative or obligation, of feeling called
upon to respond in one way or another, of being given guidance.
We might also speak of others' inviting our response. But for the
purposes of the discussions to come, I want also to use another
term, one that may at first seem a bit puzzling. I want to call
the signals that flow to us from others light. It's a helpful
name for these signals because it suggests that, like the physical
light that illuminates the world for us, these signals show us the
way forward.
Conscience
May Change, but the Light Does Not
In Part 15 we discussed corruption of conscience, and we need
for just a moment to review what was said.
When Jennifer
began to find faults in her aunt, to cover Jennifer's failure to
visit her aunt in the hospital, she made that visit seem hard to
make. Why should she put herself in the company of a person she
knew was critical of her? What might have seemed to her an invitation
and an opportunity now struck her as awkward and humiliating.
Once this deformity
of soul had taken place—once the moral blindness had set in—Jennifer's
conscience was thoroughly bamboozled. Whatever she did received
her conscience's approval, for remember, she could no longer tell
the difference between a counterfeit of goodness and the real thing.
If she had made the visit, her conscience would have patted her
on the back, because making that visit would have been a hard thing
to do. When she failed to go, her conscience endorsed that too,
for the same basic reason—because it would have been hard to do.
We can see from
this example that by means of our conscience, which ought to protect
us from self-deception, we are able to fabricate support for whatever
lie we may be living!
What happens
in such cases? How do we lose our sense of right and wrong? Isn't
our conscience still active?
To answer those
questions we must draw a clear distinction between the light, or
the source of our understanding of right and wrong, and conscience.
The light does not get snuffed out. It continues always to stream
toward us from the faces and voices and gestures of others. "Living
means being addressed." Precisely because the light originates
not from within ourselves but from the inward life of others, nothing
we do can staunch its flow. Our conscience, on the other hand, is
part of us, one of our faculties or abilities. If we deceive ourselves,
conscience is deceived also. The light does not change, but conscience
does. And it changes by making the light seem different than
it is. It distorts the truth about others.
Historically
the word conscience was used to designate something different
from our sense of right and wrong. Studies of the development of
the word from its Latin beginnings (and also the development of
its Greek counterpart, suneidesis) reveal that historically
it meant nothing more than being conscious of ourselves, our responses,
and our actions. It is, literally, the knowledge of ourselves that
we share with ourselves. Think of it as partly a sort of self-monitoring
by which we observe whether we are acting according to our sense
of right and wrong and partly a talking to ourselves about how well
we are doing. Thus, if we have done nothing wrong, we can say, truthfully,
"My conscience is clear." If we have done wrong and admitted
it to ourselves, we say, "I have something on my conscience."
It's this conscience,
this self-understanding, that changes when we betray ourselves;
it gives the light a distorted meaning that serves our self- justifying
purposes, a meaning it does not have in and of itself. We should
be warned that the adage, "Let your conscience be your guide!"
is sound advice only when we haven't allowed our consciences to
become corrupted. Sometimes it's better to say: "Let the truth
(about others' needs, for example) be your guide!" Or, "Let
the light be your guide."
Now, you may
not want to use the word conscience as I have used it. You
may prefer saving this word to describe the source of our understanding
of right and wrong. Obviously, you can use the word that way if
you like. All that matters here is that, however we choose to use
the words involved, we avoid confusing the two elements we are talking
about: (1) the reality of other creatures and of God that guides
us in how we ought to respond to them, which I have been calling
light, and (2) our inherent capacity, which I have been calling
conscience, to monitor what we are doing. Light we do not
control and cannot change; conscience we may misuse to twist our
perception of the light and of how faithfully we are responding
to it.
A Perverse
Sensitivity
We self-betrayers, then, do not lose touch with the light. In
fact, we're intensely preoccupied with it—in its twisted form, of
course. We stay vigilantly alert to others, on the lookout for evidence
that will justify us. Almost always, this evidence against others
is our distorted interpretation of the very signals that, if our
hearts were not accusing, would reveal to us their needs. In the
Christmas story, Glen took attentive note of every one of Becky's
needs for help on Christmas projects. But he perceived them as pressure
to ignore the rest of his responsibilities and throw himself recklessly
into these projects. And for her part, Becky never failed to note
well all of Glen's desperate efforts to get to work on time or relax
with the children and took them to be further attempts on his part
to get out of his Christmas responsibilities.
We might be
tempted to call those who would do this sort of thing insensitive
to others' feelings. After all, they seem to treat others as objects
to be used or pushed out of the way. But on the contrary, they are
hypersensitive to one another, alert to every possible indication
of inconsiderate or neglectful intent. That's why we think of them
as insensitive—not because of inattentiveness but because of selfishness.
Their keen attention to one another resembles that of a soldier
on guard duty, alertly suspicious of everyone, whereas a true sensitivity
would be more like the attention paid by a medic to a comrade's
battlefield wounds. Our insensitivity as self-betrayers is best
described not as attending to ourselves rather than to others, but
rather as attending to others for our sake rather than for
their sake.
The word perverse
aptly expresses this self-absorbed hypersensitivity to others.
Versio means to turn, and in earlier times per-version
meant to turn away from the sacred or enlightening things toward
something profane or degraded. More recently, the word has acquired
the connotation of obstinacy or willful hardness, as when we say
of people who refuse to admit something that's right in front of
their eyes, "They're just being perverse." This word helpfully
captures the fact that the guarded, suspicious, I-It attitude is
not a way of being on its own, but a twisting, distorting, or misshaping
of the natural, good, and graceful way of being that would be ours
were we not caught up in self-betrayal.
I Am My "Box"
What we are learning in this section helps to clarify what was
intended with the box metaphor introduced in Part 4 and used in Part 14 to represent important elements of
collusion. The walls of the box don't surround us, like the walls
of a room. They don't cut us off from other people. Instead, -they're
our distorted perceptions of people. It's best to think of the box
as the self-absorbed, defensive way we become when we betray ourselves.
We aren't isolated within the box. We are the box.
We might liken
ourselves to a malfunctioning television set, picking up the signal
but distorting it terribly. Or, to change the metaphor, we might
think of ourselves as a lump of murky gelatin, as compared, say,
to a perfectly clean pane of glass with no irregularities in it
at all. Signals from others can and do penetrate, but they get warped
and jumbled by the irregular texture through which they must pass.
We can represent
this in the box model:
 The point is that
in self-betrayal, we do pay close attention to the people
we harden ourselves against. But, as Leo Rosten is reputed to have
said, "We see them not as they are but as we are."
This truth suggests
that we must also use Buber's term I-It with care. We do
not really regard other people as objects when we are in that mode
of being. Instead, we regard them as subjects, able to act on their
own and be impressed, intimidated, or otherwise manipulated by our
self-displays. The way we sometimes treat people may bear superficial
resemblance to the way we treat mere mannequins, but when we observe
it closely we see that it differs profoundly. The story of the "intellectual"
honors student from Part 6 shows that even to marginalize or reject
people requires recognizing and acknowledging something of their
inward life and their ability to perceive and respond to us—in short,
something of their humanity.
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