In ‘A portrait of human dignity’ Shanti reports on his present understanding of what it means to be human (Part 1 of 5).
It’s March 10, 1945 and ‘Here am I’. I arrive on this planet during the very night of what is considered the deadliest aerial bombardment ever, on Tokyo, estimated to have killed nearly 100,000 human beings.
Maybe that’s why my parents decide to call me ‘Peace’, French style: René, rooted in the Greek ‘ειρήνη’. My mother loves to flirt with her precious knowledge of a few French words. And had I been a girl, for sure she would have called me Irene.
(here in the front, at the left), literally and metaphorically.
Then it gets serious, as far as my inner world is concerned: they bring me to a church and have me baptized in a creed which contains all the answers to all the existential questions, as all creeds do. This particular one is the Roman Catholic version, but it could have been the Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish or Islamic as well – to mention the Big Five – or one of the more than 4000 minor recognized religions of the world who all claim ‘the truth and nothing but the truth’. So, which ‘truth’ will become yours just depends on nothing else than the place you happen to be born! That’s weird, isn’t it?
Nobody asks me for permission, but if they had done so and had I realized what this initiation with ‘holy water’ over my head actually meant, I would have said to the priests of the world – to those who are responsible for messing up our inner world – exactly the same words as Greta Thunberg recently spoke to the politicians of the UN Climate Action Summit – to those who are co-responsible for messing up Planet Terra, our outside world: “How dare you!” Now I just cried a bit, because that cold water disturbed my afternoon nap.
Baptism is just the beginning of an invasion, soon to be followed by two other ‘sacraments’, called ‘Holy Communion’ and ‘Confirmation’, and before I can develop any critical thinking at all, this trio initiates me ‘for eternity’ into the Roman Catholic (RC) Religion. What makes this such a crime against our human dignity?
It’s drugging our wonder about who and where we are, an anesthesia of an original being while it is still asleep, just a potential, still a seed, a bud, not yet in bloom.
It’s an uninvited occupation of an innocent and open mind with a programme of indoctrination, which most likely will prevent this child from finding his own existential questions and his own answers to them, will avert it from it’s own quest, because now ‘the truth and nothing but the truth’ will be supposed to be known already. It is no less than a violation of our birthright, in my opinion.
Kahlil Gibran warned against this in The Prophet, but our ears are shut:
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said,
“Speak to us of children.”
And he said: “Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”
It seems we have different standards for the outer and the inner world. We rightly condemn the unwanted intrusion into the intimacy of our body, but the same violence against our inner world we hide behind so-called ‘sacred’ initiations.
The crime is that an open and wondering being, at home with himself or herself, who asks for nothing more than some food, some shelter and some loving care, is fooled and made to believe she or he can not trust her or his own intuition and judgement, because truth and wisdom and fulfilment are supposed to be found and realized only by living up to the outward standards, found in some kind of -ism.
That’s how we get lost, uprooted, confused and repelled from our own center, our own inside, our own path made by our own walking. Who we are and what we are doing here; how to behave; all the latest news about a so-called heaven and an eternal hell; how we all are bearing an ‘original sin’ and are tempted to do the wrong things… this list is a Christian Catechism long and an Old and a New Testament thick.
We are made to believe that the fulfillment of our lives depends on living a traditional religion, not in our own wonder and in our growing insights as a result of our own experience and our own life’s adventures.
Also, in the school we have to study these books and even get a grade for it, in my case always the highest one possible. In the church they are explained again and again and gradually an open and wondering child turns into a believer, Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu or whatsoever. To paraphrase Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Man is born free, but immediately put into chains!” So the first libretto or ‘wording’ I met in my life about my identity as a human being was a Holy Book, styled Roman Catholic, a 2023-year-old tradition, accompanied by Gregorian music.
I loved both! I even fell in love with this ‘Heavenly Father’ and at the still young age of 12 I left the family I happened to be born into and I danced joyously into a seminary, eager to become his priest. It was a beautiful period in my life, most valuable and enriching. There were languages and literature, Latin and Greek, English and French and German, Virgil and Homer, Plato and Socrates, Mozart and Vivaldi, film and acting, pitting potatoes in the early morning and mystic moments in the rich liturgy. Every second I lived on the lap of this most Supreme Being, the Creator of the Universe, which I molded myself into a most loving father, pure love, completely ignoring his role as the Chief Justice who will judge me at the end of my life and punish me if I didn’t live up to his high and inhuman standards, the one who is reported to have said in the Old Testament: “I am not your uncle!”
But gradually, 18 years old now and reaching the age of critical thinking and sexual maturity, there was, all of a sudden, an inside ‘plop’ in a blessed split second, just like a soap bubble bursting, an immediate awakening… and gone was my Heavenly Father and my ‘vocation’ to become his mediator with the people overhere.
All of a sudden I understood that I had lived, from my very first day up to then, a traditional tale told to me by others, a story I had taken much more serious than all the other fairy tales, myths and sagas told me.
It’s so understandable that I had lived this very tale about who we are and why we are here to the fullest, because at that time it was the only story that dominated every nook and cranny of the society I was born into. From the day I was brought to the church and baptized into ‘Marinus Franciscus Maria Joseph’, I was continuously surrounded, 18 years long, only by RC parents, priests, bishops, teachers, nuns, football coaches, union leaders and headhunters for young boys with ‘a vocation to become a priest’! The whole of society was dressed in the yellow and white of the Vatican.
Looking back, not in anger but in thankfulness and amazement, I experience this tale as a hilarious story. It’s beyond the scope of this article to go into more detail about how I read the libretto of the RC Church now, but if you are interested, please read the words of my ‘fellow altar boy and brother in crime’, British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in his wonderful book, The God Delusion.
Having lost contact or no longer aware of our own inner world, we may need a reminder, a sounding board, something outside of us which can reflect our individuality, our lost uniqueness back into our awareness.
A kind of ‘midwife’ might be helpful, anyone or anything that is able to remind us of that lost inner world, can awaken our capacity for wonder: a poet for example who can sing of that world, a composer or a musician who can make it audible, an artist who is able to hint at it, a scientist who shows us the wonders of life and the immensity of the universe, but also a beautiful sunrise, the smile of a child, an orgastic experience, the bottom of our grief or a friend into whose loving eyes you suddenly see mirrored how loveable a being you are.
For me the RC paradigm wasn’t the right-sounding board to bless me with this experience, although it may be so for others, for a man called Francis of Assisi for example, the man who sung ‘The canticle of the Sun’, also known as the Canticle of the Creatures or Laudes Creaturarum.
In my own eyes there were inhuman ideals of perfection and the corresponding guilt of not been able to live up to them; there was the load of the ‘original sin’ and our supposed tendency towards ‘evil’; a taboo on the celebration of our sexuality and the joy of living here on Earth, and too much focus on an eternal life after death with heavenly pleasures, provided we stayed away from all that’s so juicy overhere.
That ‘plop’ was such a blessing. It freed me from a libretto sunken in so deeply into me and left me with the same innocence and wonder of my very first days, but this time with a difference. Now I was my own man, now I loved this innocent and wondering child unconditionally myself and – meanwhile equipped with the ability to think critically as a bonus – I felt dedicated to take care of it whatever happens, which I am doing ever since.
To be continued…
Read the whole series
- A portrait of human dignity by Shanti
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