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 a long time to stay out of the realm of controversy, but I can't do it anymore. Our culture is completely out of balance and needs a good swift kick in the pants to get back on track. So let's start with the imbalance of religion and ritual, shall we?

Pro-Life

Take the sanctity of life for instance. There are religious people who will kill people because they are pro-life. There are "pro-lifers" that are for the death penalty. I have found that some religions lack support for parents grieving the loss of an infant. In some cases ritual and the rigidity around the rules of ritual even cause harm. For example, if a baby is stillborn into a Catholic family, that baby cannot 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 would think they’d baptize any baby. Even if it is totally against their teachings or rules, I believe a priest or member of the clergy should do something, anything, make something up! Adapt the baptism to fit the circumstances, to comfort the parents. Don't you think that's what Jesus would do? He broke the rules of the sabbath after all!

Pro-Life

The flip side of the rigidity coin is a total lack of religion and ritual. That has become more and more the norm in our “fast food,” “drive-thru,” “microwave,” “instant gratification,” “3 days bereavement leave” kind of culture. It seems our culture turns to education, research and psychology as opposed to spirituality and ritualization when dealing with death. The problem is this approach completely removes the heart. I believe a major contributor to the issue is the commercialization of death. It's a business so we use words that desensitize us, like corpses and fetuses so it's easier to "dispose" of them in the same way we dispose of atomic waste and trash.

For weeks, I have been asking myself, “What on earth 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 value of an individual life and has 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 serious quagmire for parents grieving after an early 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 because of the political stances on both sides of the issue, the grief totally gets missed. Let me explain. The rhetoric used to justify “choice” refers to a baby as tissue or a fetus. If you are pro-choice and you have an abortion, it is not politically correct to grieve the loss or even have regrets because, God forbid, it give the pro-lifers ammunition to take away choice. Likewise, if you and your peers are pro-choice, when a miscarriage happens early, the overall tone, albeit unconscious, is that it was just tissue or a fetus.

In Remembering Well, Sarah York, a Universalist Unitarian minister, made a comment in reference to an infant that had died shortly after birth, that absolutely horrified me! She said, “He was not just a handicapped infant who never had a chance…he was a person who had spent some time in this world, and his parents needed to hold a service to remember him well.” The words seem benign but only to those who buy into the philosophy that “JUST a handicapped infant who never had a chance” who is aborted or miscarried, is somehow less valuable than one that lived for a little while. Four pages later she redeems herself by saying, “The physical remains, even of a fetus that has been 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 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 believe that regardless of the circumstances, there is a very real relationship between the BABY (I am more and more offended by the term fetus than I ever could have imagined) and his or her parents. This is the entire basis of my work as a spiritual counselor and speaker.

Miscarriage

In February 2004, my partner Cindy miscarried a perfectly healthy girl at 8 weeks. We were devastated. Because of Cindy’s age, there was no time to waste: we had to try again immediately. It’s odd and yet very common in our culture that virtually no one really acknowledged our loss. Don’t get me wrong, people were sad for us but the general feeling I got was, “OK, that was sad
,
but let’s move on.” I must look deep within myself to fully grasp the effect my pro-choice views may have had on the way I handled the loss of our first daughter. In hindsight, I regret the fact that we didn’t do a ritual after that 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 answer to this question is highly complex. In my experience, the people that come to my church or to me for spiritual counseling have been deeply wounded by organized religion and have thrown out all that is good (i.e. ritual) because they have 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 no more secrets and the darkness that has been hidden behind church and temple walls is being brought out into 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, creating a meeting-ground where people can share deep feelings, positive and negative…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 tell you… the loss of ritual in our culture has virtually eliminated a sense 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 is released and supported by communal ritual.

How on Earth did we get 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 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 hope that I can give it justice as I try 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 series of rites of passage to become men. The first initiation involved Bassomb leaving his family behind, spending ninety days with twenty-seven other boys his age in a dangerous forest. The group of boys had one elder who was the initiator. The role of the initiator was to teach the boys the kind of reverence for God, culture, tradition and intuition needed to become a man.

Right there we can see several stark differences from our culture. First, Americans have very few elders and the elders we do have are not remotely respected. Second, because of the “melting pot” origins of our country, there is no one culture. Consequently most cultures within the United States have become watered down and homogenized. I have heard the phrase “the Americanization of the World,” and believe me, it is not being used as a compliment. Thirdly, there is 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 are not taught about the importance of their intuition. Is it any surprise that we are destroying our earth, attacking each other and bereft of values? I digress.

Rites of Passage

The African Bassa boys were taught about how to use what they learned to navigate the many “crossroads” they will encounter when put to the test. Bassomb states, “I learned that the crossroads are not only where people coming from south, north, east and west meet, but there also come together the old and new, the traditional and the modern, 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 few weeks, Bassomb was called out of his family home 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 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 to fill our baskets. 'Check the baskets often,' Mom said. She is the one who taught me to pray, which is to say to put my basket at the crossroads, an empty 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 about the baskets, but we were taught to fill them with recognition, achievement for the sake of self, and money. In our culture, that is 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 try 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 are raising generation after generation of people incapable of being present enough to do 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 give them opportunities to find God (the Divine within), themselves and to stay present, in the moment to survive with no time 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 provides a place where an elder’s story of loss can inspire the younger generations.