Notes

What Has Happened to Empathy and Compassion in Our Culture For Grievers
I think I have the answers, so take a seat and get ready for a long VERY controversial post. I have tried for years to stay out of your realm of controversy, but I cannot do it anymore. Our culture is totally out of balance and needs a good swift activate the pants to get back on the right track. So let's start with the imbalance of religion and ritual, shall we?

Take the sanctity of life for example. There are religious individuals who will kill people because they are pro-life. You can find "pro-lifers" that are for the death penalty. I have found that some religions lack support for parents grieving the loss of an infant. Sometimes ritual and the rigidity around the rules of ritual even cause harm. For instance, in case a baby is stillborn right into a Catholic family, that baby can't be baptized because baptism is a rite for the living. That baby was living and for a religion that preaches, "Life begins at conception," you'll think they'd baptize any baby. Even though it really is totally against their teachings or rules, I really believe a priest or member of the clergy must do something, anything, make something up! Adapt the baptism to match the circumstances, to comfort the parents. Don't you think that's what Jesus would do? He broke the rules of the sabbath in the end!

The flip side of the rigidity coin is really a total insufficient religion and ritual. That has become more and more typical in our "fast food," "drive-through," "microwave," "instant gratification," "3 days bereavement leave" sort of culture. It seems our culture turns to education, research and psychology as opposed to spirituality and ritualization when coping with death. The thing is this process completely removes the center. I believe a major contributor to the problem is the commercialization of death. It is a business so we use words that desensitize us, like corpses and fetuses so it is easier to "dispose" of these just as we get rid of atomic waste and trash.

For weeks, I have already been asking myself, "What the heck could be causing this calloused, non-empathetic treatment of the dead and of grievers?" I believe a lack of spirituality, life without rites of passage and rituals has created a lack of respect for the worthiness of a person life and contains desensitized us to death. Political correctness hasn't helped much either.

That leads me to a very touchy subject, abortion! The argument of when life actually begins has generated a significant quagmire for parents grieving after an early on or midterm miscarriage and even for parents who have made the difficult choice to abort. The grieving that occurs for both sets of parents is profound but due to political stances on both sides of the issue, the grief totally gets missed. I want to explain. The rhetoric used to justify "choice" refers to a baby as tissue or a fetus. If you are pro-choice and you also have an abortion, it is not politically correct to grieve the loss and even have regrets because, God forbid, it supply the pro-lifers ammunition to eliminate choice. Likewise, if you as well as your peers are pro-choice, when a miscarriage happens early, the overall tone, albeit unconscious, is that it was just tissue or perhaps a fetus.

In Remembering Well, Sarah York, a Universalist Unitarian minister, made a comment in mention of an infant that had died soon after birth, that absolutely horrified me! She said, "He was not only a handicapped infant who never had the opportunity...he was somebody who had spent a while nowadays, and his parents had a need to hold a service to keep in mind him well." The words seem benign but and then those who agree with the philosophy that "Only a handicapped infant who never had a chance" who is aborted or miscarried, is somehow less valuable than one which lived for a time. Four pages later she redeems herself by saying, "The physical remains, even of a fetus that is aborted by choice, deserve a ceremony of committal. This honors...the relationship that existed between parent or parents and fetus." On this point, I couldn't agree more. A baby's life in-utero inside our culture, has been given less value, which leaves the parents on both sides of the issue communally unsupported. Remember the priest who preached pro-life but whose rules dictated that the baby hadn't lived long enough to be baptized?

Unless you know me, it may surprise you to understand that I'm completely pro-choice. However, I believe that whatever the circumstances, there is a very real relationship between your BABY (I'm an increasing number of offended by the term fetus than I ever may have imagined) and his or her parents. Here is check here of might work as a spiritual counselor and speaker.

In February 2004, my partner Cindy miscarried a perfectly healthy girl at 2 months. We were devastated. Because of Cindy's age, there is virtually no time to waste: we had to use again immediately. It's odd and yet very common inside our culture that without any one really acknowledged our loss. Don't get me wrong, individuals were sad for us however the general feeling I acquired was, "OK, that has been sad, but let's move ahead." I must look deep within myself to totally grasp the effect my pro-choice views could have had along the way I handled the increased loss of our first daughter. In hindsight, I regret the fact that we didn't execute a ritual from then on loss. I regret not naming her. I regret that she was discarded as "bio-hazardous waste."

My next question is, what has caused our culture to reject spirituality, rites of passage and rituals? The solution to this question is highly complicated. In my experience, the people that come to my church or even to me for spiritual counseling have already been deeply wounded by organized religion and also have thrown out all that's good (i.e. ritual) because they have already been harmed by the leaders of said religion. I call it "throwing the Bible out with the bath water." Ritual in addition has been used to abuse people by the religious leaders they grew up trusting. Further, in the age of information, there are no more secrets and the darkness that has been hidden behind church and temple walls has been brought out in to the light. It is no surprise that a relatively conscious person would cast a jaundiced eye on everything linked to organized religion.

Starhawk said, "Rituals build community, developing a meeting-ground where people can share deep feelings, positive and negative...a place where they are able to sing or scream, howl ecstatically or furiously, play or keep a solemn silence"

What effect has the rejection of ritual had on our society? I'll tell you... the increased loss of ritual in our culture has virtually eliminated a feeling of real community, thereby isolating people, leaving them completely alone with their deep feelings. No-one escapes loss and generally speaking, there are no safe places (other than privately or with a therapist) where people can release on a profound level, the kind of grief that's released and supported by communal ritual.

How on the planet did we arrive here? How is it that empathy and compassion around death and loss is going the way of the Dodo Bird? The answers to these questions surprised me and I found them in Crossroads: The Quest for Contemporary Rites of Passage, in a piece called "Baskets at the Crossroads," by Nouk Bassomb. Well, it had been like finding the ULTIMATE GOAL! Bassomb describes the rites of passage by which all thirteen-year-old African Bassa boys must go. He tells it beautifully. I am hoping that I could give it justice as I make an effort to summarize it.

In the African Bassa culture, a grown man is expected to be "a firm, upright support for the entire village." But that expectation doesn't emerge from nowhere. Boys are initiated and go through a number of rites of passage to become men. The initial initiation involved Bassomb leaving his family behind, spending three months with twenty-seven other boys his age in a dangerous forest. The band of boys had one elder who was the initiator. The role of the initiator was to instruct the boys the sort of reverence for God, culture, tradition and intuition had a need to become a man.

Right there we are able to see several stark differences from our culture. First, Americans have very few elders and the elders we do have aren't remotely respected. Second, due to "melting pot" origins of our country, there is no one culture. Consequently most cultures within america have grown to be watered down and homogenized. I've heard the phrase "the Americanization of the World," and trust me, it is not being used as a compliment. Thirdly, there's very little reverence for God even in the most religious and spiritual communities because we are so busy trying to be right and make others' beliefs wrong. Which, in principle, is NOT reverence for God, nor is it philosophically American. Last but not least, it is criminal that the men in our culture aren't taught about the need for their intuition. Is it any surprise that people are destroying our earth, attacking one another and bereft of values? I digress.

The African Bassa boys were taught about how exactly to utilize what they learned to navigate the countless "crossroads" they'll encounter when put to the test. Bassomb states, "I learned that the crossroads aren't only where people coming from south, north, east and west meet, but there also come together the old and new, the traditional and the present day, the archaic and the contemporary, the young and the aged, the visible and the invisible, the world or the living and the world of the dead."

Within a couple of weeks, Bassomb was called out of his house and told, "It's time for you to depart, boy. Go! Now!" He is forced to leave his family, his home, his village with nothing more than a cloth wrap around his waist. The elders tell him that for the "next 18 moons" he cannot return to the village or communicate in any way with anyone in the village. As Bassomb, a thirteen-year-old boy, walked out of the village, he heard his mother shout, "Be humble and compassionate... and praise the Father each and every day. Don't forget to put your baskets at the crossroads. And check them often."

Which brings me to probably the most profound lesson we can study from this beautiful man and his story. Nouk Bassomb wrote, "It is at the crossroads that people learn kindness, love, respect for the elders, protection of children, compassion for the weak and the meek. Being generous, compassionate, humble, hospitable, all help to fill our baskets. 'Check the baskets often,' Mom said. She actually is the one who taught me to pray, which is to say to put my basket at the crossroads, a clear basket."

The boys of that culture are taught to fill their baskets with "stories and experiences," not material goods. This rite of passage empowers these boys and not only turns them into men, but good men. In my youth, it could be argued that my peers and I were taught concerning the baskets, but we were taught to fill them with recognition, achievement for the sake of self, and money. Inside our culture, that's what defines success. Experience, wisdom and stories are of no value other than entertainment at a party or a juicy "tell all book."

American teens and children are being robbed of the gift of empowerment. The more they make an effort to fill their baskets with "gold and silver," the emptier they feel. The emptier they feel, the more our teens turn to drugs, alcohol, violence, sex and video games to numb out to their emotions or present circumstances. Without rites of passage and ritual, we have been raising generation after generation of individuals incapable of being present enough to accomplish their own grieving, let alone have compassion for another person who is in grief.

Our children and also adults must be put in situations that provide them opportunities to get God (the Divine within), themselves also to stay present, in as soon as to survive without time and energy to numb out. That will create a "village" that comforts the grieving, that walks using them through the procedure. A village it doesn't label grief in stages, or diagnose grief as a neurosis, and a place where an elder's story of loss can inspire the younger generations.

Gabrielle Michel

Asheville, NC

828-505-2491

Hypnotherapist/spiritual counselor, minister, singer and writer. I've made a 100% commitment to using every aspect of my voice to teach people how exactly to move gracefully through life's challenges for the purpose of their Soul Evolvement. After becoming an ordained Church of Truth minister in 2000, I took on the role of Dean at The Church of Truth School for Advanced Metaphysical Studies. I have had an effective private practice as a spiritual counselor and hypnotherapist since 1995. I make an effort to be considered a woman of compassion, empathy, humor, reverence, irreverence and faith.
Website: https://www.shreesacredsounds.com/tips-for-aspiring-aviators/