Stories of Grace and Pathology

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.