Damnation Lite

                                                            Damnation Lite

                                                          by Marco M. Pardi

                                                 All comments appreciated.

“I’ll tell you a big secret, mon cher. Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.” Albert Camus. (1913-1960). The Fall. 1956.

Since Raymond Moody’s book, Life After Life, a massive groundswell of literature, film, and first hand testimony has touted what has come to be known as the Near Death Experience. Sadly it has, like other phenomena, been formalized into a sequential framework of events. One of these events, perhaps most dreaded by the living, is the “Life Review”, a process during which the newly deceased is confronted with a replay of his physical life including his actions in relation to other people and how those people felt about and were affected by those actions.

But this calls the question:  Who goes through life blissfully unaware of how they affect others?  Many people seem to like praise.  But, I’ve always felt if you are willing to take the credit you should be willing to take the blame.  Of course, I’m well aware of the existential paradox of free will versus determinism, a choice for the latter being a get out of jail free card. At the same time, however, determinism is a dis-invitation to the awards ceremony, a prospect not so welcome to many.

Many of us can recall the all smothering hectoring of the clerics, making almost every thought, word, and deed potentially sinful if not eternally damning. Even the feeling of being unsinful was sinful, the sin of Pride.  Indeed, getting born at all was sinful; we came in with Original Sin, borrowed from the loving god of the Hebrews visiting the sins of the fathers upon the generations to come.  No way out except to say it’s all a load of crap.  But then, if one had been baptized – forcefully among Catholics as the parents were doomed to eternal Hell if they failed to have their infant baptized before it’s third week of age, or among other sects and religions that similarly induct children around the age of puberty – rejection of the “grace” once given is an even greater sacrilege than never having been baptized at all.  Oh, yes, those poor souls who died without baptism go to “Limbo” (now questionable in Catholic catechism), which is to say they spend eternity in the penalty box, watching the game but never being able to play.  Other Christian sects take a far more harsh view of the unbaptized, no matter their circumstances.

Yes, there are growing numbers of groups dedicated to detoxifying survivors of cults. But these are the more sensational subjects; they are not the ones to which most people would look and say, “Oh, yeah. I need one of those.”

A multitude of ongoing polls and surveys finds that, in most advanced civilizations, an overwhelming majority of adults have rejected the religious upbringing to which they were subjected.  But have they freed themselves from damnation?  One does not need a Ph.D. in physics to know Newton’s 3rd Law: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

I have written elsewhere of how I, to acquire a better understanding of issues involved in families facing a death, obtained permission to sit in on A.A. meetings, alcohol being involved somewhere in the family matrix.  Despite official A.A. denials these groups overwhelmingly based their core pronouncements on religion. Before long I heard of “secular” recovery groups and similarly attended those. However, the overwhelming majority of meetings were filled with complaints about the religious orientation of the A.A. groups which the secular group members had previously attended.   I waited, usually in vain for someone to address the issue of getting and keeping sober – period.  And so I formed a hypothesis that, despite the bravura, these folks had not freed themselves of religion’s grip on their lives.  Thou dost protest too much. The very act of reacting displays the power of attachment to the initial action.  I’ve also written in another post of the two monks and the girl in distress. We often carry our attachments with us long after separation from the source.

Damnation occurs in the secular sphere as well.  We often read of women who stay with their abusers, return to their abusers, or move serially through one abuser after another. Most often these women become visible through visits to emergency rooms for physical injuries. What we do not often see are abused men.  True, fewer of them incur physical injuries but the mental and emotional injuries are there nonetheless and men typically do not present at emergency rooms with bruised and broken spirits.

A former colleague told me of how his (then) wife surprised him one day.  “I hate you!”, she announced, with venom.  When he asked why she said, “Everything you do, you do so well!”  Isn’t there some saying like damned by faint praise?  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t?  His choice seemed to be between continuing to earn her hatred through achievement and earning her scorn through failure.  His solution arrived with the news that, to bolster her miserably low self esteem she was bedding half the men in town including two of his doctor friends and several of his co-workers all the while spreading vicious lies about him.  He put her out on the street, where she belonged. But it was clear he carried that burden in many of his ongoing interactions. “One nice thing I can say about aging is that I can look back on an increasing number of those fuckers and say, ‘They’re fucking dead'”.  How nice. 

Yet this same former colleague, who is considering a second marriage, finds himself in a very similar situation ( I also know the woman in question. She constantly mocks, belittles and criticizes him though on a good day she may have half his I.Q.), except there is no blatantly expressed vitriol or infidelity. Is he damned by being exceptionally intelligent, or by making poor choices in marriage?  And who, or what set this in motion?  He did enjoy a previous relationship which foundered for career reasons and the burden for him now is to avoid the trap of attaching himself to how things were as a measure of how things are.  Few things are worse than comparing, openly or not, a current partner to a previous one. Perhaps I’ll see how he handles it; I’ve always found the best answers come when I don’t ask questions.

These conversations and experiences got me wondering: How much of our assessment of the present is an expression of the burdens or the glories of the past?  When faced with the trackless expanse of the future, how much is our first Small step for mankind determined by the tracks we’ve left behind?

Many sources, whether based on intense interviews or on simple observation cite the reluctance, even refusal of long term concentration camp and prisoner of war internees to leave the camp upon liberation.  Not to be confused with the Stockholm Syndrome, this reluctance is a testament to the power of even a relatively recent event – the captivity, to obliterate the personal history of even those who were taken as adults.  Having become thoroughly opaque portraits of a reality painted for them by their captors, no light from their pre-captivity past shines through to show them the way forward.

Years ago, when the State of Florida had “chain gangs” that hacked the weeds and picked up the garbage along the roads I interviewed prisoners in the county “road camps”.  The newcomers were interesting, but the deeply involving cases were found among the “lifers”.  I’m not referring to people sentenced to life in prison by the State; I’m referring to people sentenced to life in prison by something inside themselves. Though constrained by time I did manage discussions with four or five men in their 50’s and 60’s.  Each divulged a life story of successive prison sentences from juvenile hall to adult prisons, with hardly any free time in between.  The one most vocal seemed to speak for the others when he said prison had always been his home; upon release he would ensure his recapture for a new crime so he could come home.  Without the time to do an in depth search with him I could only assume that at some early point in his life he had become “damned” in a sense to repeat and sustain these Sisyphean labors. But by whom, or what?  I interviewed a prisoner in a military setting about why he stole and tried to sell classified documents.  His answer was, “I’d be accused of it anyway.”  Clearly, he had constructed for himself an imaginary society waiting for a chance to accuse him.  He had damned himself.

These prisoners were not born criminals. To what degree do we allow our present circumstances to hide the light which guided us in the past?  How easily do we allow our present circumstances to become a prophecy of our future?  Years ago a comedian made his mark with the pronouncement, “The devil made me do it”.  This played well, and still does, to audiences ignorant of the concept.  The Persian Shaitan, from whom the Hebrews garbled their externalized Satan, was not a tempter; he was the voice within us that, as we are about to speak an untruth,  arises and asks us why we are doing this. As we are about to craft a deception, reminds us of our true state.  Causes us to waiver in our affirmations of self righteousness before the Judge.

Having known psychiatrists and psychologists and having studied the theories and methods of these disciplines I place very careful or little stock in their pronouncements. In answer to a question from a recent acquaintance I said I was multiple retiree.  I’ve done some of this and some of that.  The discussion then turned to how I felt about no longer doing this, or that.  Given that I had named only two mostly sequential but briefly concurrent careers I had no problem in explaining that what I do is not necessarily who I am. But deep within me I know I have a core identity, an identity which has been veneered with visible professions, jobs, social personas, and other interchangeable labels and from which I will retire only when I expire. Where did it come from, why was/is it there? How it got there is unlikely to be agreed upon by any two specialists, much less biographers. Should I use my present to unearth my past?  I have.  Retirement can afford that to you.  But I can measure my freedom by the presence or absence of my reaction to such questions if they are asked.  And some reactions, if I provide them, are cloaked.  

I’ve posed several questions and I’m guessing most if not all are applicable to every reader. Maybe you have the answers.  Damned if I do.