If there were such a thing as DNA testing to determine the paternity of a stuffed animal, I am sure that my brother Phil’s chromosomes would perfectly match those contained within the fibrous sinews of my best friend, Squiddy. Squiddy was not your typical, run of the mill, teddy-bear-like transitional object. For starters, he was not a bear, and despite his name, he was not originally a squid either. Squiddy started out his life as a ridiculous looking octopus with a red hat, and a decidedly non-ferocious looking mouth that looked as if lipstick had been applied. From the moment I released him from his wrapping paper/cardboard prison, my discerning five-year-old eye could tell that the process of Squiddy’s liberation was only just beginning.
Squiddy’s entry into my life began with my brother Phil’s Fifth Grade career in oceanography that lasted about as long as Johnny Paper’s relationship with Puff the Magic Dragon. But back before his retirement from the watery world occupied by Jacques Cousteau and the denizens of the deep, Phil was obsessed with all things oceanic. And since Phil was my idol, I too became a junior oceanographer.
Time/Life, and National Geographic would feed my brother’s obsession with a monthly supply of books and magazines featuring pictures of foreboding creatures with sharp teeth, and luminous eyes. But out of all of the pictures in all of those books, one picture firmly set a hook in my little boy imagination. “No one has actually ever seen or photographed one of these,” my brother explained as he directed my attention to an artist’s rendering. “Only the damage done to deep-sea diving Sperm Whales proves that giant squids actually exist.”
Out from the slick pages of one of his books stared an angry-eyed titanic creature that had wrapped its punishing tentacles around a hapless Sperm Whale. Just at that moment, the squid was in the process of cracking the whale like a Brazil nut, and feeding off of its sorry remains. If Tyrannosaurus Rexes could swim, this creature would have eaten them like popcorn.
After laying my five-year-old eyes on that gangly behemoth, it was all-squids-all-of-the-time for me. In the early 1960’s the stuffed animal kingdom was not known for its biodiversity. My aunt did her level best to locate a fuzzy stuffed squid. The furry, effete cephalopoda octopoda vulgarus staring up at me from its newly torn open box was as close as she could get. Within a day, I had ripped off its silly hat, and lips. I assigned the creature a surname, a new genus and species, and potentially, a new gender. Just like that, my best friend was also the most powerful creature on earth (or under the water). And needless-to-say, being friends with the most powerful creature on earth had its advantages for a five-year-old boy who was scared of the dark.
Sigmund Freud, the most famous atheist of the Twentieth Century, maintained that God was nothing more than a sophisticated version of my childhood friend, Squiddy. He asserted that when human beings are scared of the dark, (Here substitute the words, “death,” or “illness,” or any other calamity you wish.), they cling to the concept of God the way a child clings to a transitional object like a Teddy Bear, or a blankie (or a squid that resembles an octopus).
I have always wondered how Psychoanalytic Theory would have been influenced if Freud could have encountered a more intellectually robust theism that bore the counter-cultural fruit of justice and mercy. To be fair to Sigmund, and his followers, we who gather in churches, temples, and synogogues frequently carry ourselves in ways that appear to support the religious critiques of Psychoanalysis, or for that matter Marxism (“Religion is the opiate of the masses”). In her clever poem, “I Feel Sorry for Jesus,” Naomi Shihab Nye invites her readers to ponder the way that we believers tend to make God in our own image and likeness rather than than the other way around. Reading her verses, I am reminded how spirituality is meant to make wayfarers and sekers of all of us. Her subtle insight has me noticing the religious tendency in our time to settle for small and cruel certitudes that we hang around God’s neckas if She sent us a proprietary email that we need to proclaim. And it occurs to me, that if I start siting examples of where I think this is going on, I would be doing the same thing! See how easy it is to fall into that ego-satisfying trap?
This week, my church (Catholicism) will focus on what we call “The Good Shepherd Discourse” of John’s Gospel(Chapter 10). I defy anyone to read that chapter and tell me that it is not at least a little bit confusing. Today, in light of the poem appended at the conclusion of this article, I am thinking that’s the point. Perhaps the author of John’s Gospel is introducing us to Jesus the spiritual master who places us into a certitude busting confusion so that deeper, more freedom-producing truths might arise. Like a really great Math student, the trick is to not settle on the easy equation that you can practically solve in your sleep. The trick is to stand in the not-knowing long enough for deeper truths to emerge. This week, would you be willing to loosen your grip from around your tightly held certitudes for a more open-handed, warm hearted approach? Would you be willing to create a “secret pouch of listening?”
I Feel Sorry for Jesus
Written by Naomi Shihab Nye
People won’t leave Him alone.
I know He said, wherever two or more
are gathered in my name…
but I’ll bet some days He regrets it.
Cozily they tell you what He wants
and doesn’t want
as if they just got an email.
Remember ‘Telephone,’ that pass-it-on game
Where the message changed dramatically
By the time it rounded the circle?
Well.
People blame terrible pieties on Jesus.
They want to be his special pet.
Jesus deserves better.
I think He’s been exhausted
for a very long time.
He went into the desert, friends.
He didn’t go into the pomp.
He didn’t go into
the golden chandeliers
and say, the truth tastes better here.
See? I’m talking like I know.
It’s dangerous talking for Jesus.
You get carried away almost immediately.
I stood in the spot where He was born.
I closed my eyes where He died and didn’t die.
Every twist of the Via Dolorosa
was written on my skin.
And that makes me feel like being silent
for Him, you know? A secret pouch
of listening. You won’t hear me
mention this again.