He’s not what Freud meant, but close.
I heard a preacher on TV making fun of professional mourners. You know, the people in olden times who got paid (PAID!) to cry at a funeral. This television shepherd of living room sheep thought that was dumb and I found that ironic. He missed the connection. So, I made a mountain out of a molehill and called them (their number was on screen) with a parable.
Who wants to see something shitty about themselves?
I.
There was once a young minister sitting in his house on a Sunday afternoon who was disturbed by a frantic banging at the front door. Upon opening, he was confronted by a distraught member of his church. He was exhausted from running and on the verge of tears.
“What’s wrong?” asked the minister.
“Please, can you help?” replied the man, out of breath. “A kind and considerate family nearby is in great trouble. Husband lost his job, wife racked with health problems and they have three young children. The man’s mother lives with them and is need of constant care. They are one day late with the rent and despite having lived there for ten years with no problems, the landlord is threatening to kick them all onto the street if they don’t pay in full by sundown!”
“Why of course we will help with some money from the church fund,” replied the minister as she got her coat. “How is it that you know these people?”
“Oh,” replied the man, “I’m the landlord.”
II.
If your first instinct is to become angry with the landlord, you are protecting yourself from what you don’t want to know. If your next thought was, I want to write like N. your getting worse. Defense mechanisms are there to keep us from changing.
III.
It was Freud who suggested that we cannot escape our daily anxieties. They will come to haunt us in our dreams. A famous example he recounts is of a man who falls asleep while keeping guard over his son’s coffin in the next room. In the ensuing dream, the man is confronted by his son, who proclaims, “Father, can’t you see I am burning?” At this point the man, who feels profound guilt over the death of his son, wakes up to the smell of smoke and discovers a candle has fallen and ignited the coffin.
You might be tempted to say, well, the smoke influenced the dream and he was awakened because it didn’t fit. Why is there smoke? Oh shit! Wake up!
But one could also say, as Lacan and Zizek do, that the irritation of smoke resulted in the mind digging deeper to maintain sleep which led to the fathers direct confrontation with his deeply hidden guilt: his responsibility for the death of his son. An experience so traumatic that he sought escape by waking up.
In order to keep on ‘dreaming’, he woke himself. The confrontation of ‘the real’ in his sleep was more powerful than reality; faced with the horror of his guilt he awakened into reality instead.
IV.
Church folk love to wag fingers at late night partying, drinking, drug taking and fornication but these are not attempts to make a mundane, shitty existence pleasurable as they accuse. Rather they are often futile strategies to ward off the horrifying real that awaits us in our dreams and moments of reflection.
They (as well as workaholics, constant church activities, porn) can act as a protective screen that shields us from a direct encounter with what really matters to us. What drives us (often guilt). We avoid the truth of who we really are. In dreams we are confronted with everything we have hidden from ourselves during the day. Your insomnia and your black outs are not symptoms. They are your defenses.
V.
I’m no theologian but it seems to me that a Pastors job would be to lead his/her congregation into the emotional turmoil of having faith. The breaching of the many defenses we all have. Facing who we really are, during the day, so to speak.
In essence, they are leading believers to confront the horrific, the real, the self and the infinite. Facing death and what it might mean, sucks. Most avoid it. Facing a God who was crucified seems worse. So if you are going to do it, you had better address the anxiety of loss and abandonment, despair and forsaken-ness. In a word, Doubt.
When they DON’T do this, they create religion. Which, as we are all familiar, is just a happy, campy way to do whatever we want while also claiming an (unreflective) belief in the proper dogma. You see, says the landlord, I don’t really need to face my guilt or do anything about it like, say... engaging in practices that follow this god since you will do it for me preacher. You believe and I can leave here feeling righteous. I don’t have to actually do anything so long as I claim that I believe the right things too. Just like you. See ya next week. If I say I believe, why that’s good enough. Ah, living the dream. Narcissism: the religion of self, where actions don’t matter, only intentions.
And my intention today is to kick out some no good, delinquent renters! But I need some way to not deal with the guilt of hurting them...
VI.
Which brings us back to the professional mourner. People paid to act one way so that I, the on-looker could act another-- go about my day and always be the onlooker. The mourner paid to cry at the funeral is a substitute. A substitute for me so that I don’t have to enter that story.
I don’t have to care for my fellow man or the loss of her. Others are paid to do that. Now I can spend my time making money, which they get a cut of, and consuming. I can be a landlord and go to church and be well respected but never have to consider how I might actually actively comply with the god I claim to believe in and care for others more than myself. Because thats risky. Better a proxy do it instead.
By design, the minister on stage does it for me. The modern day paid mourner. The dancing clown with a tear in his eye. The louder he is, the greater my belief must be, right? Without a commitment to a lifestyle that gives me my identity... I’m left with folksy songs about how awesome we are and hatred for infidels next door because they ain’t sheer awesome like us.
If you reduce something to insignificance, don’t be appalled when your flock thinks it, insignificant. At least that’s what I told the polite person who answered my call.
The priest/mourner has learned, no, not strong enough... capitalized on how to facilitate our narcissism, whose #1 defense is identity preservation (#2 is JizzHut.com if you were wondering...).
Most of us are aware of these issues. Add in, ecological disaster, financial inequality, racism; it doesn’t matter because we refuse to confront them. Hell, thats why we are here.
We are the landlord. Just, whatever you do. Don’t go to sleep.
The right reverend,
N.
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