Sunday, March 23, 2025

 Sunday, March 23, 2025

   I went to church for the 9 a.m. Mass, as usual.  I was anxious. I had stepped into a hornet’s nest when I did a healing on the lovely woman who invited me for Christmas dinner. I didn’t think I had to say anything to her ahead of time. She and her husband are very involved in the monthly healing session conducted at the church.  For me, healing is healing. Sadly, that’s not the case for her.

     There is a fundamentalist sect within the church.  The deacon warned me there are many conservatives within the church. I hadn’t run into much of that up to that point. 

    I knew one woman who declared that all Muslims are evil. When I pointed out the harm and evil done by church representatives, she claimed those were the exceptions, influenced by people outside the church.  This is a phenomenon known as an in-group bias.  Those who belong to my group are good- with a few exceptions; those who belong to another group are bad- perhaps with a few exceptions.   In-group bias has positive aspects, too. The idea that charity should start close to home isn’t bad. Our first commitment should be to those we are bonded with. 

   I endorse the idea that the push for religious commonality is based on this principle. Jews were a bunch of competing tribes until Moses established the religion of the one God to which all the tribes belonged. If someone followed the Ten Commandments, he could be trusted. If he didn’t, he couldn’t.

    The tendency to in-group bias is powerful. Experiments have been done with random groups of people. They are assigned to two groups, where each member is given a physical item to help identify them, a colored shirt or tag. These two groups quickly become opposing, favoring the members of their group versus the other.  I’ve been in situations like this.  I remember adopting that attitude as a form of play. I didn’t adopt negative feelings about the other group members; it was just fun yelling at them. It must be deeply embedded in the human psyche. I don’t think it’s something we must learn “before we’re six or seven or eight.”  The negative feelings about the other group can escalate to toxic levels.

    The negative response of the lovely lady who embraces a fundamentalist concept of Catholicism to energy healing was a total surprise and very upsetting because of the impact on her and the effect on me.  Rigid thinkers can’t handle contradiction.  It rocks their world. They need things to be certain.  I live in a world with a lot of uncertainty.  Joseph has a term for people with fixed ideas, cognitively secure.  One day, I told Joseph I appreciated him because he was cognitively insecure.  I don’t think those are the best terms because cognitively insecure doesn’t accurately describe open-minded people. There’s a difference between being willing to understand someone else’s point of view and agreeing with it. If you’re cognitively insecure, drawing a conclusion takes you a minute. I was accused of being naive because my first response was to believe what someone said. If you’re cognitively ‘secure,’ your no is immediately.

   Since my mom told me over and over that no one liked me and no one wanted anything to do with me, the threat of rejection as a blighted person impacted me.  I was nervous about going to church today. What was I going to face?  Would that lovely lady, and she truly is one, avoid me? Would I be reproached by her and others? Would I be made to feel unwelcome at the church because I was an energy healer? 

   I would go with a warrior spirit in the past, ready to take on the maddening crowd single-handedly. I was fierce. It was the best I could do, and I did it.  Now, I try a more subdued approach. I might still be good with the fierce approach if need be, but it has limited application for my sake and for the sake of any cause I defend. I find the quieter approach more effective.  Railing at people has its place in the arsenal. But as Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” But trying something new when we believe our ‘trick’ is the best one in the book requires more courage than anything else I’ve ever had to do.  The fight mode comes to me easily. It’s my first choice. Using other tactics to relate and get what I want is much scarier. Fear is a bitch.

    I went to church acting as if nothing was going on.   Well, not quite. I usually sat on the lanai outside of the main body of the church, where this lovely lady could see me, and I could see her. I think she was the more upset of the two of us.  I didn’t want to disturb her peace during the Mass.  I chose a seat where I wasn’t in her line of sight.

   In the past, she always exited the church by the door near where I sat. Last week, she didn’t do that.  I looked for her during the Mass. She wasn’t sitting next to her husband in their usual spot. I looked for her after Mass. She was sitting in the back of the church. She looked upset. I didn’t intrude. 

    This week, she sought me out and asked if I attended Mass last week.  I didn’t contradict her, which I would have done in my bad old days. I told her I had brought the Gokhale book 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. No thanks. She was leaving for the mainland to be with her daughter when she gave birth.  I told her I had it in my car; I could run out and get it. No, thanks.  That second offer was a violation of Asian manners. My bad. I won’t do it to her again. She sought me out and greeted me, but she wasn’t the open-faced, loving self I had known before.  At least she was not leading a group to banish me from the church. I doubt the priest would cooperate with that, but one never knows, do one?

   I had no students today. I usually have fourth-grade MH on Sundays. She had the following week off from school for spring break, so her dad asked if we could meet on Monday.

 Her break was one week after the public school spring break.  I just had church and a group acupuncture session at Unity, where I go for a monthly sound bath and crystal healing.

   Roger introduced the weekly Chi Qigong sessions to Unity and was the acupuncturist. Instead of lying on mats, as we do for the other two activities, they set up a circle of chairs.  About nine people attended. Roger worked with us one at a time, asking us what we wanted him to work on and inserting the needles.   Diane, who administers the church, announced that he was available for Friday appointments. As I figured, this was an advertisement ploy. He was drumming for paying customers.