Notes

What Has Happened to Empathy and Compassion inside our Culture For Grievers
I think I have the answers, so take a seat and obtain ready for an extended VERY controversial post. I've tried for a long period to stay out of the realm of controversy, but I can't take action anymore. Our culture is totally out of balance and needs a good swift kick in 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 people who will kill people because they're pro-life. There are "pro-lifers" that are for the death penalty. I have found that some religions lack support for parents grieving the increased loss of an infant. Sometimes ritual and the rigidity around the rules of ritual even cause harm. For example, in case a baby is stillborn right into a Catholic family, that baby can't be baptized because baptism is really 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 should do something, anything, make something up! Adapt the baptism to match the circumstances, to comfort the parents. Not 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 a total insufficient religion and ritual. get more info has been more and more typical in our "fast food," "drive-through," "microwave," "instant gratification," "3 days bereavement leave" kind of culture. It seems our culture turns to education, research and psychology instead of spirituality and ritualization when dealing with death. The thing is this process completely removes the center. I believe a significant contributor to the problem is the commercialization of death. It's a business so we use words that desensitize us, like corpses and fetuses so it is easier to "dispose" of them just as we dispose 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 really believe too little spirituality, life without rites of passage and rituals has generated a lack of respect for the worthiness of a person life and contains desensitized us to death. Political correctness hasn't helped much either.

Which leads me to a very touchy subject, abortion! The argument of when life actually begins has created a significant quagmire for parents grieving after an early or midterm miscarriage and even for parents who've made the difficult choice to abort. The grieving that occurs for both sets of parents is profound but as a result of 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. When you are pro-choice and you have an abortion, it isn't politically correct to grieve the loss or even have regrets because, God forbid, it supply the pro-lifers ammunition to take away choice. Likewise, in the event that you as well as your peers are pro-choice, whenever a miscarriage happens early, the overall tone, albeit unconscious, is that it had been just tissue or perhaps a fetus.

In Remembering Well, Sarah York, a Universalist Unitarian minister, made a comment in reference to an infant that had died soon after birth, that absolutely horrified me! She said, "He had not been only a handicapped infant who never really had the opportunity...he was someone who had spent a while nowadays, and his parents had a need to hold a service to keep in mind him well." What seem benign but and then those who buy into the philosophy that "JUST a handicapped infant who never really had a chance" who's aborted or miscarried, is somehow less valuable than one that 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 partnership that existed between parent or parents and fetus." With this point, I couldn't agree more. A baby's life in-utero in 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 know that I am completely pro-choice. However, I really believe that whatever the circumstances, there is a very real relationship between your BABY (I am a growing number of offended by the term fetus than I ever could have imagined) and his or her parents. Here is the entire basis of my work as a spiritual counselor and speaker.

In February 2004, my partner Cindy miscarried a perfectly healthy girl at 8 weeks. We were devastated. Due to Cindy's age, there is virtually no time to waste: we had to use again immediately. It's odd and yet very common in our culture that without any one really acknowledged our loss. read more get me wrong, individuals were sad for us but the general feeling I got was, "OK, that has been sad, but let's move ahead." I have to look deep within myself to totally grasp the effect my pro-choice views could have had along the way I handled the loss of our first daughter. In hindsight, I regret the truth that we didn't do 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 the question is highly complex. In my experience, individuals which come to my church or even to me for spiritual counseling have been deeply wounded by organized religion and also have thrown out all that is 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 has also been used to abuse people by the religious leaders they grew up trusting. Further, in the age of information, there are forget about secrets and the darkness that has been hidden behind church and temple walls has been brought out into the light. It is no surprise 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, negative and positive...a place where they can 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 let you know... the loss of ritual inside our culture has virtually eliminated a sense of real community, thereby isolating people, leaving them completely alone making use of their deep feelings. Nobody escapes loss and in most cases, you can find no safe places (apart from 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 could it be that empathy and compassion around death and loss is certainly going the way of the Dodo Bird? The answers to these questions surprised me and I found them in Crossroads: The Search for Contemporary Rites of Passage, in a bit called "Baskets at the Crossroads," by Nouk Bassomb. Well, it was like finding the Holy Grail! Bassomb describes the rites of passage through which all thirteen-year-old African Bassa boys must go. He tells it beautifully. I am hoping that I can 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 come out of 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 simply the initiator. The role of the initiator was to instruct the boys the kind of reverence for God, culture, tradition and intuition needed to become a man.

Right there we are able to see several stark differences from our culture. First, Americans have hardly any elders and the elders we do have aren't remotely respected. Second, due to the "melting pot" origins of our country, there is no one culture. Consequently most cultures within america have become watered down and homogenized. I have heard the phrase "the Americanization of the World," and trust me, it is not used as a compliment. Thirdly, there is very little reverence for God even yet in the most religious and spiritual communities because we have been so busy trying to be right and make others' beliefs wrong. Which, in principle, isn't reverence for God, neither is it philosophically American. Finally, it really is criminal that the men in our culture are not taught about the importance of their intuition. Is it any surprise that we are destroying our earth, attacking one another and bereft of values? I digress.

The African Bassa boys were taught about how to use 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 via south, north, east and west meet, but there also come together the old and new, the original and the present day, the archaic and the contemporary, the young and the aged, the visible and the invisible, the planet or the living and the planet of the dead."

Within a few weeks, Bassomb was called out of his family home and told, "It's time for you to depart, boy. Go! Now!" He could be forced to leave his family, his home, his village with only a cloth wrap around his waist. The elders simply 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 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 learn from this beautiful man and his story. Nouk Bassomb wrote, "It is at the crossroads that we learn kindness, love, respect for the elders, protection of children, compassion for the weak and the meek. Being generous, compassionate, humble, hospitable, all help fill our baskets. 'Check the baskets often,' Mom said. She is the one who taught me to pray, that is to say to place 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 own youth, it may be argued that my peers and I were taught about the baskets, but we were taught to fill them with recognition, achievement for the sake of self, and money. In our culture, that's what defines success. Experience, wisdom and stories are of no value apart from entertainment at a party or perhaps 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 gaming to numb out to their emotions or present circumstances. Without rites of passage and ritual, we are raising generation after generation of individuals not capable of being present enough to accomplish their own grieving, let alone have compassion for someone else who is in grief.

Our children and even adults need to be put in situations that provide them opportunities to find God (the Divine within), themselves and to stay present, in the moment to survive without time and energy to numb out. That will create a "village" that comforts the grieving, that walks with them through the process. A village that doesn't label grief in stages, or diagnose grief as a neurosis, and a place where an elder's story of loss can inspire 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 part of my voice to instruct 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 a successful private practice as a spiritual counselor and hypnotherapist since 1995. I strive to be considered a woman of compassion, empathy, humor, reverence, irreverence and faith.
My Website: http://controlc.com/17c48193