There are some
words and phrases that seem to slip slowly into one’s consciousness. Then, like
terrible predators that consume their host from the inside, they burst into full
glory uninvited. For me there have been harmless examples like “whatever” (with
shoulders shrugged, lip curled), “yeah nah” (with emphatic disinterest), “sweet
as” (which to my Australianised ear remains “sweet ez”). There have been more
serious ones, too. I found “passive aggressive” suddenly bandied around every dysfunctional
office, virtual or actual. I’m sure there were others. But “cognitive dissonance”
is perhaps my fave.
It’s got lots
of syllables, I guess. I like syllables. They’re kind of cute. They reverberate
around the wordosphere full of self-importance, then die on a virtual pavement
somewhere because they can’t survive divorced from their environment. They
usually twitch a bit before they die, and it’s all rather sad at first, until
they’re forgotten. A metaphor for us all, really.
Apparently,
it was Leon Festinger who coined the theories of cognitive dissonance, but I
suspect they spread far and wide beyond his intentions once they left his pen.
He was big on group locomotion, too, incidentally, which always has me wanting
to join Kylie Minogue (oh, and Little Eva and Grand Funk Railroad long before
her) singing “come on baby, do the …” – but never mind. They might not
appreciate my efforts.
Still, I was cognitively
dissonating or whatever one does all over the place in church yesterday. You
see, before Mass
I like to grab a coffee, to centre myself, slow the world down, find some sacred
stillness. Yesterday was no exception. I was heading to Mass at the cathedral
(yeah, I still do cathedrals from time to time, and there’s a dissonance, cognitive or otherwise) but first I was reading
whatever my latest world-expanding adventure might be.
As it
happens it is very world-expanding. I’ve reviewed it elsewhere,[1] but
Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper of Sinjar
is a mind-blower. If you’re not sure where Sinjar is don’t rush off to add it
to you bucket list. Not yet at any rate. Thousands of Yazidi were slaughtered
there by Daesh in 2014, 500,000
fled as refugees, and the world in general has wrung its hands, hated the
perpetrators, hated the victims, erected razor wire fences and elected
governments of nationalistic protectivist hatred ever since. Yes, Trump,
Morrison (or whoever the latest Australian prime ministerial incarnation is
this week), May: I’m talking about you.
At any
rate, Dunya Mikhail’s tale is not easy reading, and there was probably a fair
bit of cognitive dissonance swilling around in my latte by the time I swallowed
the last dregs and headed off for the holies. And yeah, I’m an old-fashioned
sort of a bugger, and I like tradition and stillness, and awe, and ritual, and
the kind of counterculture (yeah, there another buzz word) they generate in the
midst of road rage and depressing news and bills to pay. So a cathedral’s not a
bad place if one overcomes the vast emptiness (that reminds me a little bit of
the universe) and the sometimes crippling weight of crumbling dreams and
glories, sometimes-corrupted glories past.
And the
hymns sung and prayers murmured and words pronounced are thick with accruals of
centuries of hope, guided and mis-guided, saturated with the implication that
countless others have stood and knelt and wept and trembled, and occasionally
laughed and danced too, in this place and this tradition. They remind me too
that while I’ll soon enough lie down with their dead the universe goes on and
perhaps hope does too, and the vast vaulted ceilings (small of course in
universal schemes, but vast enough) rumour infinity and paradoxically perhaps a
hope greater than infinity.
Occasionally
these contexts can slap the participant across the psyche with the wettest of
metaphysical wet fish. Singing songs of celestial expectation moments after reading
of the slaughter of thousands of Yazidi in the valleys of Sinjar generated brutal
cognitive something. Dissonance will have to do. From the comfort – all things
are relative – of our pews we sang ancient words of hope, set to a reflective tune,
celebrating the victory of Good over Evil. We sung in our comfortable setting
of a saviour, who
… comes in succour
speedy
to those who
suffer wrong;
to help the
poor and needy,
and bid the
weak be strong;
to give them
songs for sighing,
their darkness
turn to light,
whose souls,
condemned and dying,
were precious
in his sight.
I could not but
think of Yazidi men gunned down in the pits that awaited their death, and the
women captured, sold and raped, and the children beaten and often raped as well,
and the perpetrators who justified their acts of rape and other violence as,
believe it or not, a form of redemptive prayer. Infidel women raped by the
faithful are, according to Daeshis, made houris, made virgin, so they can be
raped by men again in heaven.
I could not help
but think of Dunya Mikhail’s narrative about lives turned from innocence to
brutal experience, trust turned to despair, children brainwashed to become
Daesh soldiers (and canon-fodder) while their mothers wept inexpressible
sorrow.
Nor could
I help but think of Scott Morrison’s determination to leave these same or
similar families incarcerated on Pacific hell-holes, or the European skinheads
marching for the right to exclude the unfortunate from their protected lands.
With
sorrow I recalled three-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach,
fleeing atrocities related to the same struggles told by Dunya Mikhail. Alan
Kurdi whose father Abdullah now laments doors slammed in the face of refugees
around the world. A broken, lifeless body on a foreign beach.
I think, too, of
Trump rarking up mantas of hate, claiming (again) that refugees bring terror
and disease, leaving seven-year-old Jakelin Caal to die at the border,
dehydrated in USA care, where she and her family sought safety, liberation from
the oppression of corruption and institutional evil, but of course Trump and
his cronies have never read the Beatitudes.
Yet as I
stumbled away suppressing tears easily because big boys don’t, but wishing they
would flow, I found one tiny sliver of hope. Because in the end – or beginning –
this strange narrative of hope in turmoil, light in despair, was born not in a
cosy armchair but in a context of cruel persecution, and somehow, somehow those
first Christians found hope in the experience of a crucified God.
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