I hope it would not be a parody of Michael Morrell’s political scientific position
to suggest all relationships are political
and all political relationships fall somewhere on a spectrum
between perfect co-empathic trust,
nutritionally and regeneratively favored by creolizing democracy,
and completely mutual distrust, antipathy,
a rabidly nihilistic strain
of totalitarian ballistic terrorism.
Should this spectrum amply describe tensions between democratic multiculturing trust
and plutocratically elitist monoculturing mistrust
then perhaps we can also see this spectral tension
between positive-regenerate social-psychology
and negative-degenerating entropic nihilism;
between cooperativity of Both/And empathic feeling and faith
and competing Either/Or antipathy
hardened reductively negative belief systems
with absence of good and healthy faith.
We might further stretch this same relational spectrum
to include hope and faith and love
as growing stages of healthy positive psychology,
so despair, and selfish faithlessness,
and raging sociopathic hatred
are parallel emerging stages
of pathologically negative anthropocentric
and egocentric
ecopolitics.
Within this wide egocentric Yang and eco-centric Yin spectrum
we learn and grow and develop our positive and negative psychology,
our health and our pathology,
as regenerative trends and our degenerative decompositional losses
into mutual immunity silos of autonomous self and other hatred;
historically characteristic of densely swarming over-populations,
beyond what Earth can ecosystemically hold and feed and enrich.
In this light and dark nondual co-arising view,
I read Dale B Martin’s understanding of how he can both be a person of Christian faith
and a student of religious and theological dark histories.
“It may well be that I have [positive psychology] faith
just because I was raised that way.
Having grown up in a religious [regenerative-normed] family,
itself the [bilateral-maternal and paternal] product of generations
of Christian people,
I may be psychologically inclined
or [co-empathic trust] habituated
to assume some ultimate [balancing] meaningfulness
of the [yang-yin nondual] universe
and the [healthy] centrality of [ecopolitical] faith for life
[rather than nihilistic despair].”
“Moreover,
my family
though attending a very conservative [homophobic] church,
was generally liberal and [inclusively] progressive.
We weren’t particularly bothered if others did not go to church
or went to a different church
[or adhered to a different positive faith system].”
Professor Martin is a brilliant “out” gay white Texas-reared male
now tenured at Yale.
Because of his family’s progressive co-empathic trust,
his parents quickly acclimated their love,
with a heterosexual-norm presumption,
to love for their gay son,
just another creative stretch of their inclusive and always yet-emerging
positive health psychology.
The primary difference between Dale Martin’s Texas experience
and my own rural Michigan experience,
was my absence of a liberal/progressive parental support system
restraining and creolizing the pathological hubris of elitist-supremacist
“from above” messianic grace
rather than “from deep within” co-empathically trusting grace
and karma.
With that difference,
Dale Martin’s positive Christian psychology has been continuous
throughout his still emerging family tree extension
to include the treasures of other regenerative traditions,
while my own journey has been more discontinuous and disjointed,
stressed and stretching
to ultimately arrive at peace with eco-messianic trust
in regenerative MotherEarth,
compatible with co-redemptive messianism,
in a lavishly creolizing composting transubstantiatingly inclusive way,
fractured and reset
rather than organically whole over my lifetime of Christian rediscovery,
as is the more continuously regenerative faith system
of Professor Martin’s still-emerging grace story.
gdill52 