Fine. Almost – But Not Quite – Great.
It was 1970, my second year of seminary (actually “novitiate” – a post-university year of “pledging” for membership and first vows in Roman Catholic orders); we were assigned as part-time chaplains-in-training at Boston City Hospital.
Fine.
Almost - but not quite – great.
‘Cept the priest in charge really couldn’t understand a political science major fraternity man from the U and would have been joyous to see me go – far, far away.
Once, after a truly harrowing day with patients, I just about sealed that “far, far away” fate.
Before the seminarian group gathered in our usual meeting room for the ride home and really needing to pray, I ducked into the hospital chapel, hoping to gather myself and “offer it all up to God” – an old Irish-Catholic line.
‘Cept.
‘Cept an extremely large woman clad only in a hospital gown and slippers kept pacing back and forth behind the altar, muttering to herself.
When the murmuring was distracting enough to cause Mother Theresa to curse like a sailor, I headed off to the meeting room.
And she followed me.
Round corners, through lobbies, down hallways, muttering “With da Father. With da Father.”
With the meeting room in sight, I sprinted. Closing the door behind me, I announced “I think I have a wild one on my hands.” Seconds later the door opened and Father Frank Diffley, sitting at the opposite end of the room, looked up and exclaimed “(Iinsert the expletives of your choice), Flynn! What have you done?”
In she walked.
In all her naked glory.
Followed by two novices. One carrying her hospital gown. The other with her slippers.
Grabbing the gown and holding it in front of her, Father Diffley attempted to move her to an adjoining room, while not-so-subtly mouthing “Call security.”
Almost an hour later and looking especially haggard, he emerged announcing “She took her clothes off three more times.”
I learned some important lessons that day: Mental illnesses, especially schizophrenia, can be terrifying; often, desperately frightened men and women with mental health problems seek comfort and support from a power beyond themselves – luck, chance, powerful others or the God that patient hoped to find and to whom she was muttering in the chapel. Anything to make the pain go away.
When overwhelming fear beclouds reason, men and women become desperate in their search for answers and cures.
Eleven years of prison “counseling” – if we can call it that – helped me to learn to pray in secret for the client in front of me and for the grace to put everything else aside and “be present” and “accepting” of anything I might hear. Prison counseling taught me the value of “quiet strength” or “strong quiet” – skills and gifts I am certain Father Diffley used during that nerve-racking hour. “Quiet strength” and “strong quiet.”
In some version, the phrase “You’re only as sick as your sickest secret” echoes so often through 12 Step meetings and treatment centers that it’s probably repeated a thousand times a day. Because prison counseling often meant a limited number of meetings, I practiced “kamikaze psychotherapy” – fast, intense and targeted. It meant positioning myself as comfortably as possible, prepared not to move a muscle or change my facial expression in response to what I might hear (often “casually” covering my mouth, lest it betray my thoughts) and drop the “therapeutic bomb” - “Without thinking and on the count of three, tell me your deepest, darkest secret. One. Two. Three.”
Too many times, the response described some kind of sexual abuse as a child or adolescent or intra-family violence so great that the adult still trembles speaking about it. Abuse dealt with through alcohol and drugs ultimately financed by crime. Lives filled with the devastating fear of being discovered.
Addiction is often a disease born of fear. Iatrogenic – “physician induced” - addictions spring from often well-intentioned physicians prescribing pain medications and pain-fearing patients over-using and abusing the medication. Emotionally, addictions are fed, empowered and preserved by fear: fear of discovery, fear of shame, fear of somehow appearing “less than.” Medically by fear of the pain of withdrawal and the early weeks and months of life without the “drug of choice.” Addictions are fed by fear of rejection by family and friends whom the active addict once “hurt” or “hurt and hurt and hurt and hurt, over and over again.”
Fear gives rise to “insanity” and any addict can tell you “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
[PLEASE NOTE: Often attributed to Albert Einstein, that’s a great quote and very popular in Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous. PROBLEM: There is no evidence that Einstein ever said anything approximating that and it’s not included in the authoritative The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, which contains roughly 1,600 verified Einstein quotes.]
Fear is powerful.
Down to his last fix, an addict will walk, run,crawl, bike (probably not Uber because that would cost money he needs for drugs) from one end of town to the other to get what he needs – because he is terrified of the pains of withdrawal.
Fear has become the favorite tool of modern-day politicians.
Although he never used the term “Great Replacement,” French nationalist author and politician Maurice Barres (1862-1923) first peddled the idea of European - especially French – culture being overwhelmed by hordes of non-French in his book L’Appel au soldat (“The Call to the Soldier”) in 1902. As an author and politician, he advocated for a platform of “Nationalism, Protectionism and Socialism.” French conspiracy theorist, white nationalist and author Jean Renaud Gabriel Camus picked up the theme with his 2012 Le Grand Replacement in which he argued that non-Europeans – black and brown immigrants – were reverse-colonizing native “white” Europeans.
On October 27, 2018, moments before he stormed Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, killing eleven and wounding six, Robert Bowers posted the message “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” For months, he had been posting diatribes in which he called immigrants “invaders” and asserted that Jews were the “enemy of white people.” His hatred of Jews was aimed particularly at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Two weeks before the massacre, he linked to a HIAS project and wrote “Why hello there HIAs! You like to bring hostile invaders to dwell among us?” He once posted “Open your Eyes! It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!!”
Wearing tactical gear and a camera attached to his outfit and shooting hundreds of rounds, Brenton Tarrant livestreamed his murder of 51 people during attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on March 15, 2019; in his 17,000-word manifesto “The Great Replacement” he said the attacks had been two years in the planning.
On August 3, 2019, Patrick Crusius drove roughly ten hours from Allen, Texas to kill 21 people in an El Paso, Texas Walmart on August 3, 2019. In his 2,300 word, four-page diatribe “The Inconvenient Truth,” he reported that he was motivated by a fear that an influential Hispanic population might make Texas a “Democratic stronghold.” He began his screed by praising Australian nationalist Tarrant.
Eighteen-year-old Payton Gendron repeatedly cited the “great replacement” theory in his 180-page diatribe posted two days before killing ten people in a Buffalo supermarket on May 14, 2022. In total, he shot 13 people, eleven of whom were Black. His manifesto included dozens of pages of antisemitic and racists memes, denigrated the intelligence of nonwhite people and attacked “Critical Race Theory,” which, despite many right-wing claims, is not taught in grade and high schools. He livestreamed his attack.
To one degree or another, Tarrant, Bowers, Crusius, Gendron others of their ilk and their “manifestos” echoed (or directly quoted) the “14 Words” of David Lane, a founding member of the white supremacist terrorist group The Order: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The phrase harkens back to Barres and Camus writing of the last century.
Even white supremacists and just-plain-haters generally fail to cite the second half of Lane’s ignominious slogan: “because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth.”
Lane was a hater par excellence. He considered the United States to be “racial treason” and committing “racial genocide against white people” and the “murder of the White race.” The terrorist group The Order, which believed that all non-whites and Jews should be barred from the United States, was responsible for the 1984 assassination of Denver-based Jewish KOA radio host Alan Berg, who could be extremely harsh with callers and dealt with divisive issues like race and religion. The Order was formed one year before Berg’s murder. Denver writer Stephen Singular documented Berg’s killing and the development of The Order:
“This group of 11 men got together in the woods and basically said: 'It’s time for a revolution in America [and] we’re going to get rid of minorities, feminists, gays, [and] whoever we decide are our enemies. They said: 'Our first assassination target will be Alan Berg.'”
Co-defendant Bruce Carroll Pierce, who fired thirteen bullets into Berg with a MAC-10 machine gun and was eventually sentenced to 252 years in prison, died in a Pennsylvania federal prison in 2010.
Lane, sentenced to 190 years in prison for his crimes as a member of The Order, died in 2007.
Two quotes illustrate the depth of his bile:
"By 1978 my research was essentially complete and the real problem was sharply delineated in my mind. The Western nations were ruled by a Zionist conspiracy … [that] above all things wants to exterminate the White Aryan race."
Lane’s undated autobiography.
"America is the murderer of the White Race. … I wouldn't contaminate my toilet with your red, white and blue rag."
"Tri-Colored Treason." Undated.
We can only guess at the fears controlling the poor, mumbling woman pacing back-and-forth behind the chapel altar in Boston. Those fears drove her to follow me through the corridors of the hospital, desperately seeking someone or something that could keep her safe from her internal terrors. Please God, Father Diffley and the professional medical/psychiatric staff of Boston City Hospital afforded her the help she needed to live without fear and with the hope and joy to which she is entitled as a beloved Child of God.
But as therapists, we also know that irrational, unrelenting fear can morph (and be generated and then morphed) into racism, antisemitism and murderous rage.
As men of Faith, we remind the politicians and others who stoke fear of immigrants, of Blacks, of LGBTQ men and women, of the “others” of the words of an itinerant preacher:
“Woe to you, blind guides!...
“Woe to you, you hypocrites. You give a tenth of your spices – mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law – justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
“Woe to you, you hypocrites. You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and self-indulgence…
“Woe to you, you hypocrites. You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean…
“In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
“Woe to you, you hypocrites…”
Matthew 23
Today, we believe he would say “Woe to you – the Tucker Carlsons, Steve Bannons, Alex Joneses and others who preach fear and incite hate and violence with your talk of a ‘great replacement.’ Woe to you!”