I suppose this will be the last of this series unless I am zapped with inspiration tomorrow, otherwise it's going to be something different. I really didn't have a clue what I was going to write today until something was mentioned on CBC Radio today that suggested that nostalgia ain't what it used to be. This is about our tendency of romanticizing or glamourizing the past, or inventing a golden age that never existed. In our own times, we have president-elect Dump vowing to make America great again as he and the Great Unwashed that elected him try to draw from a beautiful glorious past that never really existed.
I suppose we have the same problem here in Canada. For folks in their eighties the postwar era or the fifties must have been the very best, their own little golden age, when everyone worked for a living, gays and lesbians were persecuted, beat up and thrown in prison, minorities were discriminated against, mocked, joked about, beat up and thrown in prison, and women were treated like baby machines, domestic slaves or sexual objects, completely at the mercy of the dominant rape culture of patriarchy. The sixties must be it for the older boomers who still think that the Summer of Love was the greatest collective orgasm in history, although for many, and a lot of the world, it was an incredibly turbulent era of violence, famine, mass murder and assassinations. If you can remember the sixties then you weren't there. Younger boomers, such as myself, and older Gen Xers might think the seventies and eighties were marvellous. Punk rock, anyone? How about Reaganomics, Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet, the Cold War, and the looming threat of global nuclear annihilation. And so on.
Age and time can work a dangerous and pernicious magic on the human memory. In a way I can thank my having had a difficult and often miserable life until the last ten years or so for curing me permanently of this kind of barmy nostalgia nonsense. I do remember some periods of my past that did seem more positive, almost heady, as times of growth, learning and adventure. But life was still anything but easy. A survivor of childhood sexual, physical and emotional abuse, my parents` divorce and failed opportunities, my youth and middle years were marked by a continual struggle to survive, while many of my peers did reasonably well in life. I was almost always poor, though usually working fulltime. The very notion of foreign travel? Don't make me laugh. I could hardly make rent every month much less have a savings account and there was no way that I could even think of being able to shell out for plane ticket anywhere.
In my teens, as the Summer of Love was waning to a dreary and drizzly autumn of disillusion and cynicism, I was a teenage Jesus Freak. My family was a dangerous and toxic mess (I already mentioned the abuse) but I had been touched deeply by God and suddenly I was surrounded by all these awesome friends who wanted to serve Christ. We were all troubled in many ways and we were all struggling to make sense of our lives but we were in it together and the learning curve was both steep and intoxicating. I backslid and became decadent, experimenting with drugs and a very loose kind of lifestyle but I also learned from my adopted mentors about culture and literature and of the necessity of not only asking questions, but knowing what kinds of questions to ask and to whom they should be directed. But life still wasn`t easy. I was poor, struggling, sometimes not eating enough and really did not know who my friends were. I will not bore you about all the betrayals and the way they impacted me.
In my early twenties, having reclaimed my faith in Christ, I moved forward into a life of deep Christian mysticism expressed in love and service to the most vulnerable. Mother Teresa and Jean Vanier http://www.jean-vanier.org/en/home were my mentors. I was open to and meeting many interesting people and during this time I had some wonderful mentors, especially as I moved more towards social and peace activism. In my thirties I was leading a radical Christian community in a quality and intensity of spirituality and ministry that was baffling, scandalizing and inspiring to others. Yet we were always fighting, in conflict, at times coping with absolute poverty and many other problems as certain parties, be they churches or devil worshippers, feeling particularly threatened by us, launched all their wrath against us.
In my forties I failed for a while, became ill with PTSD and homeless. I got through it and even managed to launch a modestly successful career as a visual artist during this difficult time.
Now, as I am starting my sixties I feel that my life has never been better. I have been stably housed for the last fourteen years, and stably employed for the last twelve years. I am still poor. I earn only a little more than minimum wage at work that I enjoy, offering support to people living with mental illness. My rent is subsidized by the government. I pay only thirty percent of my monthly income for rent so I can afford to live with dignity and keeping rather a tight budget I am able to spend a month in Latin America every year where I can improve and polish my Spanish.
I do treasure some of my memories but really, Gentle Reader, there never has been for me such a beautiful fiction as a golden age, a past glowing with warmth and radiance that I can take refuge in whenever the cold hard light of the present becomes just too intolerable. Still, there are certain refuges of radiance and light in my memory where I sometimes like to visit and find refuge. And these were particularly meaningful periods for me where I learned so much and grew so much, but never for one moment am I going to deceive myself with the brainless nonsense that everything was hunky-dory during those times. Life was full of challenges and difficulties, but I still throve in the middle of it, even as I am thriving now as I am entering my golden years.
Even with an uncertain future for the state of my health and wellness I am entering this phase with gladness, confidence and a sense of real adventure. I am not sick and enjoy good health, though there are some concerns tht the doctors are monitoring. I still don`t care one way or the other about getting old. I only care about becoming less authentic, about lying to myself.
I can not think of a time in my life where I have had to be so nakedly honest with myself and with the world around me, yet enjoying each moment of the blessed present and the Blessed Presence as the divine gifts that these things are, have always been and always will be.
No comments:
Post a Comment