Whole In Spirit

The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.

Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware

I am lately in the habit of watching a film or listening to music or taking in a series or viewing an art exhibition and recording my impressions with an eye toward composing a lengthy essay and then never doing it. This is me trying to break that habit by setting down a developing reflection.

The image above is from The Iron Claw (2023). Much of what occurs in the film almost beggars belief, but, as it proceeds, the viewer might come to realize they’re being granted insight concerning the operation of deferential fear. This has been my experience as I’ve considered the spiritual abuse portrayed in the film and how it’s reflected in my life and the lives of lots of folks I’ve known and worked with in the beautiful state of Tennessee. Fear, often mistaken for love, dictates our dreams until it doesn’t. Too many of us reduce our lives to the size of someone else’s anger and fear. It’s difficult viewing, but it’s breathtakingly accurate. A work of mourning and acknowledgment and, here and there, a triumph.

The above passage from Alice Miller doesn’t need any help from me, but it appeared before me not long after I beheld The Iron Claw, and I want to hover over the words, “Still whole in spirit,” a little. It is the child, still whole in spirit, to which I mean to make an appeal in my speech, my writing, and my attempted teaching practice. It is the still-whole-in-spirit part of myself I hope I’m accessing when I make my appeal. William Stafford speaks of “a voice…something shadowy…a remote important region in all who talk.” I think of this as the child within and without. I think too of the suggestion that the artist is the child surviving adulthood. There’s a still-whole-in-spirit part of each of us. It’s the voice part of us. Miller calls it the body part of us. The body won’t be tricked. The body knows. It keeps the score.

There’s work to do. Righteous work. I’ll end with a William Stafford poem. I dedicate it to a recently departed friend.