Unlearning with age
I was born into an assimilationist German-Jewish family like those portrayed in the best-selling book “Our Crowd.” The “our crowd” Jews routinely attended services at New York’s Ethical Culture Society.
Four months before I was born, my father, a U.S. Naval officer, died in Leyte Gulf in the Philippines. My pregnant mother was sequestered in New York’s Plaza Hotel. A few months after I was born in March, she escaped with me in the middle of the night, took a steam train north from Penn Station to Waterbury, Vermont, then took the Couture Jitney to Morrisville, rented a second story apartment, and two years later married Emile René Couture, an original member of the Sepp Ruschp ski school in Stowe. He was the only father I ever knew.
At age four, I was baptized by Father MacDonough in the Holy Cross Church and became an altar boy at age eight. By the time I was ten, I knew the Mass in French, Latin, and English.
At thirteen, I went to Phillips Exeter Academy where, in my senior year, I read Dostoievski’s “The Brothers Karamazov” and the story within, The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.
The story is told by Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alexei, a novitiate monk. In it, Christ has returned to earth during the Spanish Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor arrests him, knowing full well he is the Son of God. He challenges Christ’s rejection of the three gifts offered him by the devil during the temptation in the desert — mystery, power, and authority. The Inquisitor explains that Christ has imbued humankind with more moral courage than it has, and that only by using the gifts of the devil, could the Church actually offer mankind salvation.
The Inquisitor sentences Christ to be burned at the stake the following day for heresy, even as the onlookers recognize him as the Son of God. Christ then kisses the Inquisitor’s “bloodless lips” and is secretly released later from his cell into the “dark alleys of the city.”
I left the Catholic Church and I never looked back.
At age 81, I’ve reviewed many of my earlier life opinions and judgements, let go of some, revised a few, and still wrestle with others.
On leaving the Church, I declared myself an atheist, but then as I approached midlife, came to realize I knew less than I’d imagined. I declared myself agnostic, admitting I had no idea whether or not the vivid afterlife portrayed in my childhood religion — hell, purgatory, and heaven — even existed.
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Catechism had taught me that some people are born evil and would either burn in hell forever or seek God’s forgiveness through confession, doing penance, and paying for their sins in purgatory (unless they could afford a plenary indulgence, which the Church sold in earlier years to those who could afford them).
The idea that anyone could be born “evil” haunted me. It seemed like an unfair and arbitrary determinant of fate.
As I age, I’ve begun to question my youthful absolutes. My life experience continues to stimulate both my intellectual humility and curiosity. Much of my old age today is consumed in reconsidering what I thought I knew.
Life experience taught me that no one is intrinsically evil. Everyone’s born with the equal capacity to do good or bad, and that our deeds make us bad, not our birthright. Deeds are evil, people are not.
I also came to understand over the years that the majority of “bad deeds” come from earlier trauma such as physical or sexual abuse, hunger and homelessness, parental addiction, abandonment… “adverse childhood experiences” (ACEs), and that these can be mitigated with “trauma-informed counselling” later in one’s life. Like a physiological disease, trauma can be medically treated.
In my work in criminal justice, I came to see that most prosecutions are for crimes of unaddressed poverty, mental illness, or addiction. And that the most effective way to reduce crime is not through incarceration but by mitigating the socio-economic conditions that cause it.
I asked a former VT Secretary of Corrections, “of the 160 women under your department’s control, how many did the public need to be protected from?” He answered immediately “twelve… women who’ve exhibited violent or psychotic behavior, usually based on prior abuse.”
Here are two of the most striking old-age epiphanies I’ve experienced: I understand much less than I had previously thought and I’m a minor species in a complex terrestrial ecosystem made up of people, fauna, and flora to all of whom I owe equal respect.
What will the next ten years bring?
