Introduction

During our sabbatical time in Italy, Liz and I stayed for a few days in Manarola, one of five picturesque little fishing towns on the Ligurian coast in the northwest of the country. These towns, known as the Cinque Terre, or ‘five lands’, have been made into a United Nations World Heritage site. Which should be a good thing, except that the towns have become overrun with tourists. We didn’t help.

Now the way you get around, from town to town, if you are not on a tour bus, is to walk or take the train. You cannot drive, for there is no parking. Walking is challenging, because the level footpath by the sea was washed out in a storm a few years ago, and is closed. You can take footpaths higher in the hills — we did this one day, and that was a strenuous walk. Or you can take the train. But did I mention the place is overrun with tourists – so the trains are standing-room crowded, and stations are rife with pickpockets.

So one day we found ourselves in the most distant town, and needed a train back to Manarola, where we were staying. No problem, we had figured out the system: buy a ticket, be sure to validate it, to avoid a heavy fine, and wait for the next train. A train came, we got on, it was clean, it was empty, we were amazed.

Then the conductor came by, and informed us we were on the rapid, the fast train, and further, it did not stop in Manarola. But, he told us, we were lucky, this train did stop in the next town, in a couple minutes, and we could change to a local train to continue to Manarola. But, looking at our tickets, he told us we’d still have to pay 16 euro, about 20 bucks, each, for the privilege of having ridden on this fast train for maybe 5 minutes.

So we  got off at the next town, jammed our bodies into the crowded local train, and rode that one stop over to Manarola. We reminded ourselves that we were fortunate that this was a problem that was easily solved with money. That particular mantra came up a lot during our travels — mostly around transportation issues like this one.

Now had the conductor not come by, we would have found ourselves going well out of our way. The ride would have been fast, but from our point of view, it would have been a ride to nowhere. A minor annoyance could have become a major time-consuming hassle.

The Fast Train and Mass Shootings

Obviously, the fast train to nowhere is a metaphor for how we make decisions in the world, how we get things done. In an emergency, in a crisis especially, when we have little time to think, we just react, and we might just hop on any train handy, no matter where it is going.

Consider how people responded to the mass shooting at the Pulse club in Orlando, last Saturday. Let me see, here are some comments made shortly after that killing.

“We cannot continue to allow thousands upon thousands of people to pour into our country many of whom have the same thought process as this savage killer,” [1]

“Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.”[2]

“Is President Obama going to finally mention the words radical Islamic terrorism? If he doesn’t he should immediately resign in disgrace!” [3]

“What has happened in Orlando is just the beginning. Our leadership is weak and ineffective. I called it and asked for the ban [that is, on Muslims entering the country]. [We] Must be tough” [4]

These are, as most all of you have figured out, comments from Donald Trump, as he tries to — I don’t know — sound presidential? build on his base? just be authentically Donald? I don’t know.

What I do know is that we tend to reach for simple solutions for complex problems. The famous journalist H. L. Mencken said, ‘There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

Of course, some of us might find simply banning assault rifles, as Hillary Clinton suggested[5], to be one of those easy solutions. It might be wrong, because there are so many assault rifles already in circulation, and it might be wrong because gun manufacturers have found ways to get around gun bans in the past.[6]

It might be wrong, but it’s a start.

Setting those things aside, the challenge for us is to go deeper, to look for solutions that are real, and effective, even if they are not easy. The writer Malcolm Gladwell explored mass shootings in schools in a New Yorker article last year.[7]  Using the work of sociologist Mark Granovetter, who studied riots, he noted that people engaged in violent acts often follow scripts — patterns of behavior created by others, before them, who have committed their own violent acts. Because of this, the mass murderers in schools tend to follow the script of the Columbine shooting: they dress in black trench coats, they make basement videos of themselves with their guns, they write out manifestos.

Gladwell was interviewed on the Recode Media podcast this week, and he talked about the Orlando massacre.

We have in this country this long and terrifying tradition of mass shootings. [Those] mass shootings are about troubled people finding scripts that allow them to play certain roles in society and fulfill certain fantasies. Every culture in the world has troubled people, but the reason that other countries don’t have mass shootings is that the scripts available to their troubled people are different.  The script that a Canadian person is following, if they are that kind of troubled, does not involve taking a semiautomatic assault rifle and going into a gay club or a high school — it’s a different script.

What has happened now is that ISIS is simply providing another script to a pool of people in the US that are looking for one. I mean Columbine … provided and continues to provide a script for dozens of school shootings, [and] that’s home grown. Is the Columbine script any worse or better or different than the ISIS script? They have the same end, which is they are used by profoundly troubled people to justify absolutely horrifying acts. … If this is terrorism, these kinds of arms-length influencing of very troubled people, it’s a very different kind of terrorism than we’ve been fighting up until now. [8]

I am sorry that I do not have a solution to the scourge of mass shootings to offer you today. I am convinced that whatever solution ultimately develops will not be an easy one, it will have its costs and can come only through hard work.

So acknowledging my limitations as a sociologist or political analyst, let me turn to an area I might know a little bit more about — religion and spirituality.

Spiritual Bypassing

In the world of religion there are many fast trains, trains that you can get on by mistake, that will take you nowhere good, fast.  I think we know many of these trains, and some of us have ridden them, and gotten off. We know of those religions that claim to offer the sole truth, the straight and narrow, all other possibilities be cast out. We know of faiths that assert to have the one righteous path to salvation, heaven, or nirvana. We know of those sects that seek to divide and demean human beings, that seek to align themselves with power and empire, to legitimize oppression and violence. We understand religious intolerance very well.

I want to talk instead of the spiritual life, the realm of personal spirituality and practice, separate from whatever religion we might be associated with. In this world of spiritual practice, there are tracks carrying fast trains to nowhere as well.

We might, for example come to the conclusion that our own personal spiritual experience is absolute, that whatever visions or voices or luminous moments we have experienced are the singular truth. Mystical experiences can be profound, they can be wonderful, they can be great teachers, but they can also just be the ego talking. I recall a young man who was admitted to the locked unit of the psychiatric hospital where I worked as a chaplain, before I took this call (you can draw your own conclusions about my career path). This man was one of our most challenging patients, initially quite physically violent and verbally abusive. Indeed, we didn’t matter to him, as he had an experience in which he realized that he was God! Only after months of treatment did he begin to let go of that idea, and his real gifts — he was a wonderful pianist — began to shine through.

On the other hand, some of us engage in spiritual practice not so much as a way toward growth but as a way of escape. We live in a distressing, painful world, and we cannot deal with it, so we turn away from it, and focus purely on what we think are the good and positive aspects of our spirituality. We grasp after spiritual practices — yoga, prayer, meditation — simply to avoid the uncomfortable emotions that arise as we make our way in the world.

There’s a name for this: spiritual bypass. As the writer Ingrid Mathieu puts it:

Spiritual bypass is a defense mechanism. Although the defense looks a lot prettier than other defenses, it serves the same purpose. Spiritual bypass shields us from the truth, it disconnects us from our feelings, and helps us avoid the big picture. It is more about checking out than checking in—and the difference is so subtle that we usually don’t even know we are doing it.[9]

I have seen some people use spiritual bypass to avoid confronting difficult feelings, such as grief over the loss of a loved one. They may instead focus only on positive, sunny teachings or practices to cover up those difficult, dark feelings. The colors they put on their palette are limited to the bright, intense, pure tones — wonderful colors certainly, but they exclude the complex, dark, earthy tones that are also needed to depict real life.

Other people take a different kind of spiritual bypass, by directly confronting the woes of the world. They bemoan the evil, the tragedy, violence, hatred, oppression. They pour out grief and rage in tragedies like Orlando. But the shadow for them is that these are all ways of avoiding the woes in their own lives. They grieve a public tragedy, but not their own private losses. They rage at societal injustices and waste, but fail to see their own shortcomings.

The poet Tony Hoagland’s father, was a bypasser like this. He directed his rage outside himself, to illegal aliens, welfare moms and healthcare socialists, instead of confronting the cancer within. And yes, I know it is Father’s Day, and I am sorry I didn’t have a more uplifting poem for the day, but Sunday mornings cannot be just all Hallmark cards.

I suspect most of us do some form of spiritual bypassing at times. It can be a way of coping with emotions that are too hard to deal with in the moment. I know I’ve been guilty of offering platitudes — “it is what it is” — in times of great personal challenge, talking about family members who were dying. I know I’ve sometimes found escape through meditation.

But we need to realize when we’re on this train, and get off when it make sense to do so. We have to face those emotions. As Ingrid Mathieu goes on:

If I become present to who I am, all of me, there is a lot there that I usually don’t want to see. … shame, anxiety, anger, loneliness, self-loathing, our “dark” side, …. Come on, who really wants to be present to all of that?

But the more that I have tried to rise above it, or turn my back to it—the more it has lingered there, waiting, almost growing in size. So finally, I had to turn around and face it. And the most amazing thing happened (and continues to happen). It didn’t swallow me whole like I thought it would. In fact, by recognizing the “dark” stuff that was there, I could finally experience and own what was “light.” I could really believe the good stuff once I took responsibility for the stuff that didn’t look quite as shiny on the outside. These are the real fruits of spiritual and psychological development. We stop running from ourselves, and start loving ourselves.[10]

Conclusion

Notes:

1 http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/13/politics/donald-trump-orlando-massacre-speech/
2 http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/donald-trumps-exploitation-of-orlando
3 http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-13/donald-trump-fails-the-orlando-shooting-rorschach-test
4 ibid.
5 http://www.thenation.com/article/after-orlando-banning-assault-weapons-still-isnt-a-popular-idea-in-dc/
6 http://www.wsj.com/articles/an-assault-rifle-education-1466033212
7 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-violence
8 on Recode Media podcast with Peter Kafka, Jun 16, 2016
9 https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/emotional-sobriety/201110/beware-spiritual-bypass
10 ibid.