I am off for the weekend; my father’s interment and memorial service will take place separately over the course of the next few days up in Santa Barbara. Look for posting to resume on July 5.
Happy Independence Day to all, and — not in any contradiction to that spirit — come on, England!
It appears that another hot day is on the way.
I’m thinking more this morning about men, emotions, and "acting out." Like so many men in our culture, I have often been prone to first repressing my feelings, and then allowing them to manifest in unpleasant, dangerous, foolish ways. I’m not universalizing: not all men repress their feelings, and not all women express theirs in healthy ways. But for close to twenty years, from adolescence into my thirties, I regularly turned my fears and hurts into self-destructive and exploitative behavior. I medicated with substances, I acted out sexually, and (though most folks in my life today have never seen it) I was a first-class "rager." I’m amazed that in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I wasn’t shot on the freeways of Los Angeles; I had as toxic and nasty a case of chronic road rage as any I have ever seen. (No weapons, mind you, but lots of screaming and "bird-flipping" and wildly erratic driving.)
Last night, I gave thanks for the fact that I don’t "repress and act out" anymore. Though Wednesday evenings during the school year are given over to youth ministry, in the summer I belong to a men’s group. About 19 or 20 guys, ranging in age from mid-twenties to mid-sixties, gather in private homes once a week to sit and talk. Last night was only my third week with these fellas, and I can say I am enormously relieved to be doing this sort of work again. It’s been too long since I was a part of a group of men committed to spiritual and emotional growth!
In the group last night, we talked about divorce and marriage and confronting fears. As you might expect with such a group, some men are unmarried, others are divorced, others are happily married, and still others are struggling in very unhealthy marriages that teeter on the brink of dissolution. What I like about the energy of "male space" (and this is not a suggestion that this could never happen with women present) is that the focus is not merely on respectfully hearing and validating the feelings of the person who is sharing. We do that, of course, but we also work — often very confrontationally (yet politely) to push our brother towards taking positive action. Sometimes this gets carried away; so many men I know (including myself) are "good fixers". But though serious life problems can’t be solved in one two-hour group meeting, there’s something magical and immensely cathartic about having 18 other men paying attention to what’s going on in your life, and gently but firmly confronting you.
In any case, we spent part of the evening talking about feelings and impulses. We all know so well how to repress and deny our feelings; most of us also have some hilarious, tragic, shameful, painful stories about what we’ve done when "acting out" as a result of that repression. We’ve raged, we’ve sexualized inappropriately, we’ve abused alcohol and drugs, we’ve gambled compulsively — all the usual stuff. It’s not new to any of us that we have to find a middle ground between denying our feelings and being consumed by them. But I was struck by something that James, our group facilitator, said last night. He said (and I wish I could remember his exact words) something like "We first have to learn to tolerate our own emotions, and then we have to share them." I thought about the Latin origin of tolerate, from the verb "to bear" or "to carry". And for whatever reason, that word worked perfectly for me.
All of my acting-out behavior — and the acting-out behavior of so many other men — has been rooted in the absolute inability to bear feeling negative emotion. We can’t just hold the feelings at the surface, neither denying them or throwing them in other people’s faces. But one of the clear benefits of grace, of spiritual work, is the ability to bear what was previously unbearable, knowing and trusting that that burden will not be with us always. Emotions, blessedly, are transitory (more so for those of us who are Geminis, it’s true) - learning to acknowledge them, carry them, and yes, share them (as we did last night) is challenging but essential work.
Many people who have never done men’s work have some rather unfortunate stereotypes about what goes on in such groups. In most cases, there’s no drumming! There’s not necessarily a lot of weeping, either; profound emotions were shared last night and no tears were shed — but we’ve learned a long time ago that weeping is not a reliable indicator of having "gotten deep." We didn’t drink beers or smoke cigars; this group of screenwriters and teachers and mortgage brokers and therapists and actors and financial planners and trucking company supervisors simply sat in a circle (some on the floor, some sprawled) and talked about some of the most intimate aspects of our lives.
I shared a bit about my father and my reaction to his death. The lads "checked in" with me to make sure that I wasn’t secretly "acting out" to cope with my feelings; they expressed their sincere sympathies. And they made it clear to me, as some of my commenters so kindly have, that I am not doing anything wrong by simply moving forward and coping and teaching. I had worried I was unhealthily covering up my grief with activity, but I realize that I’ve been very attentive to my feelings in this past week — and that the comfort I take in returning to work is not an unhealthy sign of denial but an indicator that getting back into normal activity, where I can do what I love and what I’m good at, is actually the healthiest way of coping — at least right now. That may seem like a "duh" realization, but it was absolutely revelatory for me. I feel loads better this morning.
I’m fond of the poet laureate Ted Kooser and have had his work up here before. Though there are many poems about fathers I could put up in the aftermath of my Dad’s death, I’m struck by this one. Kooser writes of a father twenty years gone, a man who didn’t have to endure the long, slow, agonizing decline of the frail and the elderly. And in reading this, I found comfort: my papa died at 71, still in excellent health aside from the cancer that consumed his body. Until almost the very end, he was self-sufficient with his mental faculties intact. I never had to see my Dad become feeble or infirm; we never even had to consider the nursing home. As much as I miss him already and will miss him more in the years to come, that is a blessing.
Father
Today you would be ninety- seven
If you had lived, and we would all be
miserable, you and your children,
driving from clinic to clinic,
an ancient, fearful hypochondriac
and his fretful son and daughter,
asking directions, trying to read
the complicated, fading map of cures.
But with your dignity intact
you have been gone for twenty years,
and I am glad for all of us, although
I miss you every day - the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.
On this day each year you loved to relate
that at the moment of your birth
your mother glanced out the window
and saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today
lilacs are blooming in side yards
all over Iowa, still welcoming you.
I’m feeling a bit more chipper this morning; my cold is lifting and I got more sleep. My wife has been an absolute rock — supportive and loving even as she copes with her own grief over losing a father-in-law she loved and a chinchilla that was very, very close to her heart.
I’m not ready for a truly thoughtful post, but want to put up some "notes and links".
Chris Clarke’s posts always make me tear up. That’s a tribute to his talent and his vision, and to my sentimentality.
Jill at Feministe takes on the lamentable decision by animal control officials in Los Angeles to have Hooters sponsor a spay-neuter day.
My wonderful student Sarah has a terrific blog. Read this post about a letter she sent to Brio, the Focus on the Family magazine for teen girls.
One of the best commentaries I’ve read on what is going on with the Episcopal Church, women and demographics comes from Lynn; it’s long but worth the read.
A good post from Jeff about feminist men and friendship Key excerpt:
…if any of what my situation shows me applies to other feminist men, then I would hazard a guess that many feminist men are lonely for the company of other feminists, in general, and of other feminist men in particular.
He’s right.
And I’ve received a couple of e-mails to let me know that I am the recipient of a dubious honor at Rate My Professors. Perhaps I ought not even provide the link, but I might be excused a little narcissism (even unmerited) in my current state! One thing is clear from looking at this list: Canadians are hotter.
Oh, and a rant:
I admit I go to Starbucks regularly — one opened last year just off campus. I always get the same thing: "venti drip, no room." Yet I always end up in line behind my students who are ordering expensive sugary things with impossibly long names. I note that many of my colleagues go to Starbucks as well; invariably, they all order simple drip coffees. It’s as if there’s a clear age demarcation: those under 25 can’t take their coffee without all sorts of expensive, time-consuming, calorie-laden additives; those of us who were raised on java before the days of Starbucks are quite happy just to have something good, strong, and hot. I just wish, oh how I wish, that Starbucks would add an "express lane" for those of us who just want our bloody coffee without added sweetness or ceremony or expense!
It’s lunchtime, I’ve got one eye on the Spain-France scoreboard, I’m in my office, and I’m frustrated. I’m underslept, still fighting a cold, and I’m coming to the terms with the fact that I’m not nearly as good at getting in touch with my grief as I thought I was.
From 1986-2003, I was in psychotherapy fairly consistently. I’ve been around Twelve Step programs since 1987. I’ve been in a great many men’s groups, gone on countless retreats, sat in innumerable circles and talked about my feelings and listened to others talk about theirs. I’ve read just about every major self-help book published between, say, the mid-eighties and the mid-nineties. I’m a born-again ENFP Gemini who lives in L.A., for Pete’s sake — shouldn’t all of this background, all of these character attributes, make me better equipped to process my own grief at my father’s death?
Today and yesterday I’ve been alternating between a kind of numb cheerfulness and a testiness that borders on the openly angry. I’m not crying; heck, I’m not even consciously thinking much about either my Dad or Matilde and that I lost them eleven days apart. I’ve done something classically male (though plenty of women do it as well): I’ve thrown myself into activity to cope, and the solace it provides is limited indeed.
It’s not that I don’t expect to grieve. It’s that I don’t know how to grieve well, and I persist in thinking that there’s a "right way" to do this. I mean, twenty years of therapy can get me to say to myself what others are saying right now: "There are no good or bad emotions, no right or wrong way to handle the death of loved ones. Whatever you feel is okay. Take care of yourself."
Yeah, yeah, yeah — I can recite it chapter and verse. The vocabulary of consolation is so familiar to me; as a youth minister and a teacher whose "door is always open", I’ve held so many hands and proffered 8000 boxes of Kleenex and said therapeutically and pastorally appropriate things to people who are grieving losses. But I don’t practice what I preach! For all of my insistence that men need to become better verbal communicators, and develop the ability to speak of their own inner terrain, all I want to do this week is isolate and bury myself in work and activity. I don’t want to talk much to anyone. In other words, I’m reacting the way so many folks react to grief. But in my hubris and my narcissism, I think "Hugo is supposed to be so wise in the ways of the heart; Hugo has had so much therapy/prayer/encounter group/running naked in the woods/AA/what-have-you that he should be able to grieve in the most emotionally excellent way possible." I feel as if I need to model for others the most emotionally and spiritually healthy way to grieve — it sounds crazy, but the teacher and the youth leader in me always feels this compulsion to have even the most painful of emotions neatly organized, neither repressed nor indulged.
This post is not a request for advice or sympathy, though I am certainly not too proud to accept either. Though I describe myself as an "E" (an extrovert), I find that in times of high stress, my desire to crawl into a cave and isolate is immense. I don’t mind teaching, of course — but in the classroom, I can escape being preoccupied with sadness. What I don’t really want to do is interact with anyone, other than (possibly) small animals. Matilde would be such a comfort if she were still alive! Last night, just as my wife and I had talked about, I dreamed that my Dad and Matty were together in the next world. It was a very comforting dream; I thought I had cried in my sleep but when I woke my pillow was dry.
I apologize to my readers who want more feminism or faith or politics. There’s already plenty of introspection on this blog — but ultimately, I’m committed to blogging both the public and private aspects of my life and work. And right now, I’m struggling to get a handle on what I’m supposed to be feeling and doing, and it is a comfort to document that struggle.
In the last few weeks, I’ve gotten a resurgence in the "hate e-mails." You know, the expletive-filled rants that attack me, feminism, and the on-going work to raise anti-sexist consciousness among men. One fellow wrote me yesterday:
Apparently you prefer to browbeat those poor young bastards who end up forced to sit in your indoctrination sessions without the benefit of knowing that your "edification" is a pure crock of something which will soon be defecated from our society. Maybe you should switch to teaching spelling. That would be much less destructive than your current "discipline." By the way, in what field was your doctorate awarded? Or are you too embarrassed to say?
Because I write primarily about feminism, folks tend to assume that my Ph.D. is in women’s studies. As I’ve written before in a brief academic autobiography, my doctoral degree is in English Medieval History. My disssertation was on the most "masculine" and conservative subject imaginable: the role of the northeastern English episcopate (the archbishops of York and the bishops of Durham) in defending England from Scottish invasion during the reign of the three Edwards (1272-1377). With the exception of Queen Isabella (wife of Edward II), not a single woman is mentioned in the entire 300+ pages of a very dry monograph.
In my reply to the e-mail quoted above, I answered the fellow’s question. I told him, suspecting it would surprise him, that my degree was in a very traditional, male-dominated field. At least at UCLA in my day, the medievalists were famous as being the most conservative of all of the sub-divisions of the history department; the early modernists were all Marxists, the classicists were all (naturally) suspected of terrible debauchery, and the Americanists were, well, just that. (Let’s be honest: those of us who had to learn three or more languages to get our doctorates tend to be unfairly snobby towards those who need at most one foreign tongue, and that includes most of my colleagues who did degrees in American studies. It reminds me of the famous and no-doubt apocryphal story of the Oxbridge don who, upon learning that a visiting scholar did American history, said to him "How delightful. And tell me, what do you do with your afternoons?")
But here’s the point: I realize it’s deeply sexist of me to point out to everyone that my degree is, in fact, not in women’s studies. Over and over and over again, as I wrote a year and a half ago, anti-feminists question the intellectual and academic legitimacy of gender studies. There’s a widespread presumption (indescribably wrong-headed and false) that women’s studies degrees are not as difficult to earn as those in more traditional disciplines. And when I hasten to announce that no, my degree is actually in medieval ecclesiastical and military history, and I had to master all of this Latin and Anglo-Norman French, what I end up doing is reinforcing that spurious notion that women’s studies degrees don’t require as much scholarly exertion as my own. ((For the record, many of the folks I knew at UCLA who were grad students in women’s studies could run intellectual circles around me — though that may say more about my abilities than anything else!)
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with correcting people’s false assumptions. If pressed, I ought to tell the curious and the scornful that I hold a doctorate in a field far removed from the study of gender and sexuality in contemporary society. (My reasons for not getting the Ph.D. in women’s history are explained in the linked post). There’s nothing inherently wrong with setting the record straight! At the same time, I must do a better job, I realize of checking my motives. So often, I enjoy the reaction I get from men’s rights activists (MRAs) and other anti-feminists when I tell them that I hold a degree in a classically conservative field. Most of ‘em simply shut up, or change the subject. Since their goal was to make me defensive, I tend to enjoy showing the lads that they are mistaken.
But by saying "No, my degree is actually in medieval military and ecclesiastical history", I end up partially making the MRA case. By being so quick to "correct the record", perhaps I imply that I would be ashamed if my doctorate actually were in women’s studies. It might also appear, I worry, that my haste in setting things straight reflects a desire to gain legitimacy in the eyes of anti-feminist critics. I worry that my protestations about my academic background end up coming across like this: "See, I have a ‘real Ph.D.’! My feminism is important to me, but I want you to know I have a ’serious and scholarly’ background." It’s almost as if I’m seeking approval from those who are unlikely to give it.
Still, in all the years that I’ve had this conversation with anti-feminists, none of them have said "Oh, a Ph.D. in English medieval military history is no better." No, most MRAs (I say most, not all) tend to have a reverence for all things martial. Though some are suspicious of all humanities and social sciences degrees, our masculine culture tends to see military history as perhaps the most acceptable of sub-fields within the discipline. (I know lots of very conservative men who are positively addicted to the History Channel, especially when it shows its umpteenth war documentary of the week.)
So yes, I’m only telling the truth when I tell ‘em I wrote more about the battles of Falkirk and Bannockburn and Neville’s Cross than about feminism and the patriarchy — but I’m also perhaps trying to establish some kind of intellectual bona fides with my critics. It’s probably a losing effort in the long run, and it certainly ought not to be done in a way that offers even an implied criticism of feminism and gender studies. So while I won’t pretend to have a degree that I don’t have, I will be more careful not to flaunt the degree I do — particularly if when doing so, I give the impression that I consider the field in which my doctorate was earned to be more scholarly and legitimate than the one in which I now teach.
Not sure what to post this gloomy and humid noontime. I’ve got my first meeting with my summer women’s studies class coming up soon…
I could post about the World Cup, but everyone’s doing that. I loved the Mexico-Argentina match, and enjoyed (in a train-wreck sorta way) the Netherlands-Portugal debacle. Would that more Portuguese had been sent off the pitch; England will need loads of help on Saturday. I wish they would use Aaron Lennon more.
Jill at Feministe has the most appalling story of what happens in cultures that fail to hold men responsible for their actions: breast-ironing for young girls. The endless variations on what I can only call the "myth of male weakness" never cease to amaze and sadden me.
One of the many lessons I learned from my dear papa was that the notion that even young men are incapable of sexual self-control is just that, a myth. My father taught me that it was possible to love women as family members, spouses, and friends; like women as people with interesting ideas and feelings; and never hold women responsible for one’s own behavior. My Dad was often hard on himself, but he wisely neither underestimated not overestimated his limits and abilities. He made it very clear to his two sons that heterosexual attraction to women and an ability to see women as people need not ever be mutually exclusive! No matter how powerful the desire, he believed, we all have it within us to exercise loving, responsible self-control. My father never shamed my brother and me for being male, but blessedly, he also never gave us the sense that our maleness entitled us to certain privileges or excuses.
When folks ask about the origin of my pro-feminism, I usually credit my mother. My parents divorced (amicably) when I was six; I was raised by a single mom with Ms. Magazine on the coffee table! But though my mother’s politics had an enormous influence on my decision to devote so much of my professional life to gender work, I must give my father heaps of credit as well. From the time I was a small child, my father embodied a very special, human, gentle kind of authentic masculinity. He was, as everyone has been saying to us in recent weeks, immensely kind. He was physically and verbally demonstrative; he hugged and kissed all of us in public, well into adulthood.
(I have a funny story about Dad. After my parents’ divorce, my mother left Santa Barbara and brought my brother and me to Carmel. For the next decade and a half, until my brother finished high school, my Dad made regular visits to see us, coming up every six weeks. Sometimes he drove, but other times he would take Amtrak or Greyhound. When I was in high school, I occasionally drove out to Salinas to pick him up. One Friday evening, my cheerful papa bounded off a bus, raced up to me with his arms open, crying enthusiastically "Huggle Buggle!" — my childhood nickname. As we kissed and embraced, I was acutely embarrassed to note a number of other folks in the bus station watching and snickering. Such demonstrative displays of masculine affection were apparently not the norm in the Salinas Greyhound station in 1984.)
In all of my commitment to men’s work, I carry my father with me. So many men I meet in the "pro-feminist men’s community" are carrying the wounds of poor relationships with their Dads! So many men I know talk of fathers who were silent workaholics, or alcoholics, or "rage-aholics", or, simply, completely absent. Though my parents’ divorce did inflict some wounds upon me, my father made what I can only call a heroic commitment to maintain a loving relationship with us after the break-up of our family. He and my mother were in complete agreement that she should have custody of us, yet he never wavered in his emotional support. Though my father was not perfect, I am blessed not to carry through life the kind of "father wound" that so many of my brothers — and sisters — do.
For years and years, I cherished Dad’s weekend visits. In my adult life, I realize that I learned from those visits that men can and do honor their commitments to other people, and that they can do so joyfully. Yes, I went through a period in my twenties of intense anger at my father — we had some tearful, moving, powerful discussions where I was able to say everything I needed to say to him. He neither reacted in anger nor wallowed in self-pity; Dad heard what I had to say and validated it. We "cleared the air" on several occasions as I went through my turbulent late adolescence and twenties; I am so glad to say that by the time he fell ill last year, all that needed to be said had been said. I learned that tool of emotional openness from him, and I carry it into my work with my students and my colleagues and my youth group kids as well as into my marriage.
My Dad did not like labels much; he didn’t call himself a feminist or a pro-feminist. But if ever a man was committed to the full and complete equality of men and women, if ever a man was committed to greater male openness and greater male accountability, if ever a man was committed to breaking out of repressive gender roles and simply loving gently, kindly, humanely, it was my papa. I will continue to carry a great deal of him inside of me as I do this work.
It’s Monday morning, and I’m about to begin my twelfth consecutive year of teaching summer session here at Pasadena City College. Am I too young to begin asking, "Where have all the years gone?"
I’m fighting a cold, one whose symptoms first showed up on Thursday afternoon shortly after my father died. It’s not a big surprise — I’m certainly one of those people whose body manifests grief through illness. "Somatizing", I think they call it; no doubt it’s a sign I’ve got more work to do on getting "in touch" with those pesky emotions.
Frankly, four days on from my father’s death, and I’m not even sure I should be blogging. In the past few weeks, I’ve been wondering, as I am wont to do, whether I’m experiencing the "appropriate" emotions as my Dad went through the final stages of his battle with cancer. Yes, I’ve felt very sad — but at other times, I’ve felt perfectly calm. I’ve cried for my father quite a bit; indeed, he and I were able to weep together as we said how much we loved each other just a few weeks ago. But at other times, I’ve felt numb. It’s not the numbness of denial, I don’t think (and believe me, I can recite Elizabeth Kubler-Ross from memory), it’s just as if I have an intellectual understanding of what has happened but not yet a full emotional one.
On the other hand, my father would probably tell me that all of this worrying about having the "appropriate" emotions is a sign of two mild character flaws: impatience and self-absorption. I’m impatient because I want to "get through" a grieving process that will surely take months if not years, and it is undeniably self-absorbed to spend so much time wondering (and blogging!) about whether I’m feeling the "right" thing right now. For an interesting perspective on male grief, let me note this post by David Morrison, who lost his own father just a couple of months ago.
I can say with total conviction that I adored my father. He was a remarkable man who gave an extraordinary amount of love. I’m not ready to eulogize him on this blog (I may never be, though I will do so at his service this coming weekend), yet I can say that among the many things my father did well was balance extraordinary gentleness with an equally admirable and keen sense of response of ethical responsibility. Though my father was many things: a philosopher, a teacher, a musician, a devoted member of his family, at his core he was so remarkably kind and so actively good.
My father, raised in England from age three, was not a "typical American" Dad. Though he was quite fit and active all his life, he had little interest in organized sports, particularly those played in this country. We never went to a baseball game together. Unlike so many of my friends, my happiest memories of my father will not be of the things we did together. Though up until the final weeks of his life we took countless walks and hikes together, visited museums and galleries and cafes, I’m grateful that we always, always, talked. I’ve inherited from my father a keen interest in describing and discussing the inner emotional terrain of family members and friends, as well as my own. We talked so much!
My father gave me some of the phrases I’ve used on this blog: the suspicion of one’s own fraudulence and the "lie of everlasting novelty". He was good, very good, at quickly and pithily identifying emotional quandaries! He gave me a remarkable vocabulary for talking about feelings, and in doing so, helped me to understand that what I had thought was my own unique pathology was actually pretty darned universal. Like any good philosopher, he mapped the human experience so well; as a great father, he was able to use his understanding of that experience to comfort and inspire his children.
Sorry this post is so jumbled. I’ll be easing back into regular blogging, but I can tell that I’m not fully "okay" just yet. Please, however, don’t suggest I take an extended hiatus away from this blog — writing here is a source of tremendous comfort, even when I’m unclear as to what it is that I need comforting about!
My father was originally diagnosed with cancer in March, 2005, the same month in which he turned 70. For quite some time after an initial bout with radiation and surgery, we thought we had the disease licked — but his symptoms returned in mid-April of this year, and we discovered that his stomach cancer had become inoperable. My father and step-mother made the decision not to pursue painful, long-shot treatment, and instead, my Dad came home to spend his final weeks in their fine old 1880s-era adobe on Santa Barbara’s westside.
My father received regular care from the wonderful folks at Visiting Nurse and Hospice Care of Santa Barbara. Before he left the hospital to come home for the last time, he asked for three things: time to lie out in the sunshine, time with loved ones, and time to play his cello. I am so happy to say he got all three; he was able to play music up until three weeks before his death.
I’ll write more about my father next week. I will be starting summer school classes as planned on Monday the 26th, but please do understand if I am tardy about returning phone calls and e-mails. This weekend is being spent crying and laughing and comforting and remembering and, in my case, eating (my usual response to grief).
One of the benefits of having "time to plan" before he died was that Dad himself had a hand in writing his obituary. My step-mother and sisters finished it, and it will run in the local Santa Barbara paper this weekend. But I’m posting it here now. He was truly, truly, a wonderful man.
Hubert Rudolf Georg Schwyzer, professor emeritus of philosophy at UCSB, died of stomach cancer on June 22.
A gentle, kind, courteous man, a devoted husband and father, he was loved by all who knew him. He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1935 to Dr. Georg Clemens Schwyzer, a physician, and Elisabeth Schuh Schwyzer. The family, including Hubert’s older sister, Christa, was forced to flee Austria in 1938, nine months after the Anschluss. They settled in England where Dr. Schwyzer practiced medicine. After Dr. Schwyzer’s death in a car accident in 1947, Hubert’s mother took up dairy farming in Berkshire to support the family. Hubert grew up in England and attended a Jesuit boarding school before joining the Royal Air Force, where he served from 1953 to 1955. He went on to study at Reading University, where he graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1958. In 1959 he came to the United States for graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley, earning his doctorate in 1963. He taught philosophy at the University of Alberta, Canada for two years from 1963 to 1965, and at the University of California at Santa Barbara for 37 years from 1965 until his retirement in 2002. He was a popular and well-loved teacher and colleague, and the author of a book, The Unity of Understanding: A Study in Kantian Problems, published by Oxford University Press, as well as numerous articles. His writings focused on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Immanuel Kant and sought to examine and make accessible their insights into the nature of the relationship between thought and reality.
After retirement, he had more time to pursue his passion for playing the cello in chamber music groups, including the recently formed Bow’s Art Trio. For 20 years he participated in Glory Fisher’s adult education chamber music program, and attended the Humboldt Chamber Music Workshop almost every summer. Music and his friendships with his fellow musicians were great joys to him. He served on the board of the Chamber Music Society of Santa Barbara and was a member of the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara. For many years he enjoyed a daily walk at Shoreline Park.
He is survived by his wife, Carol Schwyzer, of Santa Barbara; daughters Elizabeth of Santa Barbara and Diana of San Francisco; his former wife Alison Schwyzer of Carmel, his sons Hugo of Pasadena and Philip of Exeter, England; his grandchildren Edward and Sophia; his sister Christa Pongratz-Lippitt of Vienna and his brother George Schwyzer of New York.
The family would like to thank his doctors, Cottage Hospital, and Visiting Nurse and Hospice Association for the skillful and humane care he received. We would also like to thank the many friends who have offered loving support over the past months.
UPDATE: There are a number of photos of my father in various photo albums on the right. Some of my favorites:
1. The two of us, October 2004
3. Laughing at his 70th birthday party last year
4. With my sisters and me at that birthday party
5. With me and his brother, uncle George, February 2006
My father, Hubert Rudolf Georg Schwyzer, died peacefully at his home in Santa Barbara shortly after 3:00PM this afternoon.
I won’t be posting again until next week; I’m spending the next few days in Santa Barbara at my father’s bedside. For the Thursday Short Poem this week, I’m choosing a poem written for my Dad by his long-time dear friend, fellow Englishman and UCSB colleague, John Ridland. My father has been an amateur cellist for much of his life, and until just a few weeks ago, he was able to play.
Ridland, of course, is simply transposing a famous Dylan Thomas poem. My family and I are immensely grateful for this gift; my father loved it when he received it two months ago.
A Tune from Dylan Thomas
(Transposed for Hubert Schwyzer by John Ridland)
Do not go quiet into that good light,
Even in age a man should sing and play:
Play, play his cello morning, noon, and night.
Though wise men at their end know left from right,
Because their thoughts have opened windows, they
Do not go quiet into that good light.
Good men, the last wave waved, crying how bright
The sunlight dances on Goleta Bay,
Play, play their cello morning, noon, and night.
Mild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And always knew it must be on its way,
Do not go quiet into that good light.
Grave men, near death, who hear with second sight
Wide open ears can seize the failing day,
Play, play their cello morning, noon, and night.
And you, dear friend, there on your happy height,
Bless wife, sons, daughters, us, fiercely we pray
Do not go quiet into that good light.
Play, play your cello morning, noon, and night.
It’s been a rather surreal time around here lately. We’ve been coping with Matilde’s death, and of course, are heavily focused on my father’s increasingly grave condition. For obvious reasons, I’m not prepared or able to blog about him at the moment — but I thank everyone for their thoughts and prayers.
I have a week off between the end of final exams and the beginning of summer school on June 26. The nice thing about the time off is that I get to do a lot of sleeping — and the combination of grieving and months of trying to get by on five hours a night has left me exhausted. I sleep in until the first World Cup games come on (they start at 7:00AM PDT), and my wife and I get some happy time on the couch together just watching the football. For both of us with our vaguely workaholic tendencies, it’s nice to just sit and "be" for a while.
I’ve been thinking about patriotism, nationalism, and the World Cup. (Fear not, I’ll be back on issues of feminism and faith eventually.) A few weeks ago, during a discussion on nationalism and patriotism in my modern European history class, I asked my students about the World Cup. Like most of my classes, the kids in this class were almost either immigrants or the children of immigrants: first or second-generation Mexicans, Central Americans, Chinese, Koreans, and Armenians all together made up, oh, 80% of the class.
I asked the students: "How many of you are going to follow the World Cup?" About two-thirds raised their hands.
"If you could pick any country in the world — not just from among the final 32 — to win the World Cup, how many of you would want the USA to win?" ONE hand went up; it belonged to a young man with a nice WASPy surname and a face that revealed he was stunned to be alone.
I followed up: "How many of you would like one of the countries from which your family came to win?" Almost all of the students raised their hands. (My substantial Korean and Mexican contingents showing particular, and perhaps warranted, enthusiasm?)
Now, Pasadena is not demographically representative of the USA. But discussing our favorite international soccer teams made it clear to me how so many folks in this country balance a sense of genuine American-ness with a continued passionate attachment to the lands of their birth or of their ancestors. And as I told my students, they weren’t alone. Though on my mother’s side, I’ve had family in this country since the 17th century, my father is an Austrian-born, English-bred immigrant. And since Austria is not, alas, in the finals of the World Cup, my devotion to England far outstrips any interest I have in the American squad. If England and the USA were to meet in this tournament (an exceedingly unlikely proposition at this point), I would root for England. I am, after all, a dual citizen of both this country and the UK.
My wife, who is of Colombian and Croatian ancestry, is rooting madly for the Eastern Europeans while grieving the continued decline in the footballing fortunes of the South Americans.
What does any of this say about me, my wife, and my students? Are we somehow less authentically American than those who frantically wave the stars and stripes and cheer wildly for Landon Donovan and Claudio Reyna? The easy answer is to say "No, of course not." After all, I know two current students of mine in the national guard and reserves who have fought for this country in Iraq — but are still rooting for Mexico more than for the USA in the soccer tournament. It would be absurd to impugn the patriotism of a soldier because he or she serves one nation but longs for another’s triumph!
On the other hand, the long-held suspicion of "middle America" that soccer is a "blue-state" passion may have some truth. I certainly know conservatives who love the game, and I have no hard evidence of its greater popularity among liberals. Yet given that the best soccer in the world is played outside of this country and by non-Americans, it’s only natural that those of us who love the game will be more in tune with a "foreign" worldview. If I want to read good soccer coverage, I need to find it on an English or German website (I can only read English and German). It’s only natural that those of us who care about soccer might visit, say, the Guardian’s World Cup homepage — and then stay and read some of the Guardian’s left-of-center political commentary! To put it mildly, much of the the rest of the world is increasingly anti-American; caring passionately about soccer means that American fans of the sport are more likely than their neighbors to be exposed to these different views.
I’m eager for the Croatia-Australia match, and even more eager to see England put it together (please) against Ecuador on Sunday. But I have far less interest in whether or not the USA gets by Ghana and into the final 16. I don’t actively root against the USA (as I do, say, against Argentina) but I won’t root for them either. And when I’ve got my "football hat" on, America is indeed "them."
In a comment below yesterday’s post about the election of Katharine Jefferts Schori as presiding bishop, I said (writing about the now-clear impossibility of preventing a schism):
None of us should value unity over conscience.
Evil_fizz, a regular commenter here, wrote:
Hugo, I think that this comment is worthy of its own post, especially in light of a lot of the criticism you’ve been getting in the blogosphere lately. I find it fascinating that you’re able to stand on principle when it comes to something like ordaining liberal female bishops, but you still have lunch with Glenn Sacks (to use an old and well-thrashed example).
Evil_fizz refers to my personal fondness for men’s rights/father’s rights commenter and columnist Glenn Sacks on whose radio show I appeared twice in early 2005. At various times as a result of various posts, I’ve been challenged in regards to Glenn and to my willingness to maintain warm friendships with men and women who hold strongly anti-feminist, anti-progressive views. And while I have consistently celebrated the possibility of close relationships across ideological lines, I wrote yesterday that I do think that the best solution for the Episcopal Church in the USA would be for progressives and traditionalists to go their separate ways, acknowledging that to work to stay in the same denomination would involve too great a compromise on both sides.
Friendship and denominational unity are two different things, just as friendship and marriage are different things. Last year, I wrote in defense of divorce. Quoting Hall and Oates, I suggested that when it comes to ending a marriage — or, in this case, ending a theological union — "the strong give up and move along, the weak, the weak give up and stay." That’s not a defense of giving up at the first sign of trouble; it’s an acknowledgment that after you’ve worked hard and unsuccessfully to bridge the gap, it’s wisest and best sometimes to let each other go.
On a personal level, I’m grateful for all that my ex-wives taught me, even as I’m sorry for the pain I brought to them. I’m not close to them any longer, but there is no enduring spirit of bitterness either. We let each other go in peace. I truly believe that the Episcopal Church in the USA may have reached the point where divorce is necessary and healthy. The beauty of a "good divorce" is that it brings to an end the pointless fight over who is "right" and who is "wrong." Though in the end, we Christians all believe that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, we can in good faith and conscience disagree radically about issues of sexuality and faith. Though those disagreements will not, I believe, be impediments to our collective salvation, they are — in this broken world — real impediments to unity. And that’s okay. In the name of love, perhaps now is the time to let the other go. Neither side (progressive or traditionalist) should have to sacrifice conscience any longer on an idolatrous altar of unity.
But giving up unity isn’t the same as terminating a friendship. Nothing is more important to me than my faith. The Great Fact of my life is that Jesus Christ is my savior; I believe His blood atoned for my sins and I believe I am called to follow Him. But if I limited my social network to those who shared that set of theological beliefs, my life would be poor indeed! I have friends who believe in the ordination of women — and those who are strongly opposed. I can disagree with the latter openly; real friendship is not about the denial of differences but the warm and polite exploration of those differences!
Of course, I have a great many friends who don’t share my feminism. Indeed, I am fond of some men who are active in the anti-feminist movement, just as I am close to some folks who are involved in the anti-immigrant Minuteman Project. Yes, I acknowledge that "white male privilege" allows me to move in a variety of circles with a variety of friends, but I reject the charge that to believe in something passionately means forgoing a warm relationship with someone who actively believes the opposite. I’ve been told countless times that I’m "not a serious person" (the classic slur among the leftist intelligentsia) because I insist that political and theological convictions are not the sum total of our identities. One can believe execrable things (and be an activist for execrable causes) and do so with the best of intentions and the most loving of hearts. Real friendship means "calling" one’s friends on their views and their behavior, but it also means acknowledging the possibility for mutual pleasure in each other’s company despite vast differences. Ideology, folks, is not identity. Good hearts can coexist with bad judgment and appalling views (something I know some folks regularly say about me.)
Marriage and the church involve a special kind of unity. In order for a marriage to work, it may not be necessary to share the same views (we all know couples who cancel each other out every election day), but it is necessary to share the same ultimate goals for the relationship and a general agreement about how those goals are to be achieved. Similarly, in a religious denomination, there can be some room for disagreement about non-essentials, but there needs to be a shared understanding of the fundamentals of issues like human sexuality and identity. The Anglican Communion is, I believe, irrevocably split over these latter issues. A warm and amicable divorce, with as little squabbling over property and power as possible, is in my humble lay-person’s opinion now the best course of action.*
But during and after a divorce, friendship can survive. And truly, we are all at our best when we surround ourselves with friends and family who challenge us regularly, whose beliefs trouble us as ours trouble them. We may not be able to marry them, or worship in the same house, but we can "do lunch" and go for long runs together, neither obscuring our differences nor allowing them to drive us apart.. Friendship without ideological unity? Not always easy, but almost always worth it.
*(Yes, I often mention that I’m fond of L.A.’s bishop, Jon Bruno, whom I’ve known for nearly a decade. As a layman, I disagree with his decision to engage in litigation with those parishes that wish to leave the diocese with their property. But I’m not the bishop; Jon is. My admiration for and friendship with him does not preclude my disagreeing with him on my own blog, but I do so with a humble recognition that he is surely privy to facts that I am not.)
Like many Episcopalians, I am rejoicing at the news that Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of Nevada has been elected the new presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, USA. A relatively young (54) progressive, Schori is the first woman to lead a province of the worldwide Anglican Communion. My friend and pastor Susan Russell wrote last night:
And so the very idea that the bishops of the Episcopal Church could elect a woman to lead them … and the House of Deputies concur OVERWHELMING to that election with barely a murmur of dissent is so overwhelming I’m almost afraid to go to bed tonight lest I wake up and find out it was all a dream.
I am so proud of this church I could just burst.
Proud that we were ready, willing and able to put everything else aside and select the person the Holy Spirit anointed to lead us with grace, with concord and with great joy.
Proud that through the many dangers, toils and snares we have come over the divisive issue of the ordination of women we have emerged on the other side of those challenges stronger, bolder and more open to God’s Holy Spirit.
Amen, Susan. (To continue my bad but exuberant habit of name-dropping, church scuttlebutt suggests that the bishop of Los Angeles, my old friend Jon Bruno, played a vital — perhaps even the key — role in advocating for Bishop Schori. That thought pleases me greatly.)
As a progressive evangelical Episcopalian, I’m thrilled by the choice of Schori. She’s a strong supporter of same-sex blessings, and was an early backer of Gene Robinson, the bishop of New Hampshire whose election in 2003 led to the current crisis in the Anglican Communion. Of course, both her sex and her theological views will engender (sorry) significant opposition.
Now this presents an interesting problem for conservative traditionalists in the church. Some conservatives in the national church are open to female leadership, but not to acceptance of homosexuality. Others, farther right, are opposed to both same-sex blessings and women priests (not to mention female presiding bishops!) When they express concerns about Katherine Schori, smart traditionalists will need to differentiate between their objections to women in leadership and their quarrels with her progressive theology. If they don’t, I can be fairly confident that my fellow liberals will deftly play the "sexist troglodyte" card against them!
As a pro-feminist Episcopalian (and dues-paying member of the evangelical, egalitarian Christians for Biblical Equality) I’m obviously enthusiastic about the Schori election. But even I struggled for years with the idea of women priests! As I’ve written before, I began my Christian journey with a conversion to Roman Catholicism in college. I seriously considered becoming a Dominican and giving my life to the church. Though at university I worshiped with liberal Paulists, I became comfortable with an all-male priesthood. It wasn’t a theological objection to women preaching or consecrating the host, it was simply an issue of familiarity.
I remember the first time I saw a woman preside at an Episcopal Eucharist. It was about a decade or so ago; I was estranged from Christ and His church and in the midst of a long and troubled peregrination on the "dark side". A friend of mine invited me to All Saints Pasadena (for the first time), and I came. Our current rector, Ed Bacon, had just joined the staff, but the bread and wine were consecrated by a woman I (quite accidentally) already knew well, Mary June Nestler. Mary June, a priest and now dean of the Episcopal seminary out at Claremont, had been a classmate of mine in grad school at UCLA where we both got our Ph.Ds in medieval Christian history. Back in 1991 (1992?) we sat together in a very interesting seminar on early Irish canon law. (See, I was an intellectual, once; I wrote a paper, still lurking somewhere, on the office of the episcopos as conceived in the Collection Canonum Hibernensis. Fun!)
Anyhow, I recognized Mary June and was startled. I had known two woman priests at UCLA: Mary June and the philosopher Marilyn Adams, now at Oxford and in the early ’90s, on my dissertation committee. But it’s one thing to know that a professor or a schoolmate is a priest, and another to see them "on the job"! And let me admit this embarrassing truth: as I watched Mary Jane say the Eucharistic blessing, I felt scandalized — and guilt-ridden for feeling that way. Intellectually and theologically, I was more than prepared to embrace women in leadership. Heck, by the time I showed up at All Saints that spring day ten years ago, I hardly considered myself a Christian anymore, so I didn’t feel I had much say in who ought to say mass in the church! Yet my few but intense years as a Catholic had so conditioned me to an all-male priesthood that I felt distinctly uncomfortable throughout the remainder of the service.
Obviously, once I finally did come "home" to Christ a few years later, I quickly became completely accepting of women in church leadership. I was helped in this by a brief sojourn with some hardcore Pentecostals, who combined charismatic faith with a belief that all spiritual gifts were equally open to women. Today, I’m glad to worship in a church where most of the ordained staff is female; I haven’t had even a flash of discomfort with a woman preaching or consecrating in years and years. But I haven’t forgotten that embarrassing and shocking moment many years ago, as I watched a former classmate pronounce words that I had hitherto only heard from the lips of men. I’m thus quite sympathetic to those who are initially squeamish at the notion of female priests; I know (as they will know, if they don’t run away screaming) that that discomfort vanishes with familiarity.
So, a big "hurrah" for Katharine Schori, our new presiding bishop, and for all of those women who came before her to open the priesthood to all.
Even before Matilde’s death on Sunday morning, I’d been planning to blog about animals and responsibility this week. Last month, a number of us in the blogosphere were moved by Chris Clarke’s experience with a helpless baby squirrel he discovered on a hike. Chris celebrated the little creature’s life with a fine poem, and explains eloquently why he chose to leave it to near-certain death rather than attempting a rescue.
Stentor Danielson, whose blog is one of the best in the ’sphere on matters environmental, made a powerful case that Clarke (and others in his situation) should intervene to help an injured wild animal, without worrying about "interfering with nature". Stentor writes:
Who among us would leave a human injured by a natural disaster to die, reasoning that we shouldn’t interfere with nature? Why, then, treat a suffering non-human differently than a suffering human?
One might point out, rightly, that there’s no such thing as a purely natural disaster. But there are disasters that are not purely social, and I would doubt that we can make our degree of responsibility for hurricane victims proportional to the share of the blame that human activities hold. And even so, it’s strange to claim that there purely natural disasters claim no human victims, or that we should care only for the human victims of human-caused disasters.
Our moral obligation is not just to right the wrongs that we (individually or collectively) are responsible or blameable for. Our moral obligation is to relieve suffering, regardless of what the cause is.
Saturday night, just twelve hours before Matilde passed, my wife and I were taking a walk with my two younger sisters in Santa Barbara. Since my Dad received his terminal diagnosis in April, we’ve been spending most of our weekends up in the town of my birth. It was near dusk when the four of us came across a small fledgling starling hopping along the sidewalk. At first we thought it was a small bird with a broken wing, but on closer investigation realized it was a little one still too young to fly; he presumably fell (or was pushed) from a nest. We looked around carefully — there was no sign of a nest (or anxious parent birds) anywhere nearby.
One of my sisters (who reads this blog and remembered my post about Chris and the squirrel) suggested gently we leave the bird alone and let "nature take its course." My sister is not a cruel person in the slightest; her environmentalism is simply closer to Chris Clarke’s. But my wife and I, overcome as we usually are by sentiment and compassion, made a different choice. I raced back to the house for the car and a phone book, while my wife carefully guarded the evidently frightened and exhausted little creature.
We called a 24-hour vet and were quickly directed to our new favorite charity (besides Matilde’s Mission, of course!) : The Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network. We called ‘em, dropped by, and within half an hour our little rescue was in a safe place with half a dozen other birds who had been found in similar situations. (Here is their suggestion page for wild bird emergencies.) We were assured we had done the right thing — given that our little friend was unable to fly, he would surely have been a meal for some domestic animal very quickly.
If we had been on safari in the African bush in a relatively unspoiled environment, I might have understood not interfering. But in an urban area already transformed by humans (or even in most local regional parks), there’s no point in pretending that there’s anything "natural" about leaving a helpless creature to be eaten or die of dehydration! More importantly, I am convinced that God places us in situations where we are given the opportunity to choose whether or not we will help the most vulnerable among us. Whether it is with the homeless or with the helpless, each encounter offers us a stark choice: will we be agents of God’s mercy or not?
Few serious Christians expect God, acting sovereignly, to solve all earthly problems in an instant. The healing of the world — what my Jewish and Kabbalist friends call tikkun olam – is also accomplished by God working through human beings. The Apostle tells us in 1 Corinthians that we are God’s fellow workers, and though it is God who makes all things grow and work out in the end, we are needed to plant seeds and water them. It’s useless, in other words, to cry out to God about the injustice of injured fledglings; as far as I am concerned, on Saturday night, God sent me and my wife to be His agents in the life of that tiny and vulnerable creature. What happens to that little bird after we delivered him to the Wildlife Care Network is not in our hands — but whether to intervene or not was. We did what we did not merely because it felt good, but because the healing of the human and the natural order comes, at least in part, through a billion small actions such as ours.
I am not for a minute trying to impugn the decision that Chris Clarke made to leave behind a baby squirrel. I understand his reasons, and there is a huge body of modern environmentalist literature that would agree that he did the right thing. My environmentalist credentials, after all, are suspect: I may be a vegetarian anti-fur activist, but I’ve got more than one pair of leather shoes and I do like to travel around in fuel-guzzling airplanes. I have to be careful to distinguish an intense sentimental attachment to individual animals from a wiser and broader love for all of creation.
But just as with my feminism, my environmentalism is a process — a slow deepening of my commitment to nature and a slow intensifying of my ability to empathize and connect with all of His creatures. One way I measure my growth is by my commitment to those few individual animals God places in front of me. What happened on Saturday night with the little starling was not all about me, but it was a chance — to give up an hour of my evening in service to creation, or to walk on by and remain absorbed in my (admittedly very pressing) cares. My wife and I can’t save the world by ourselves in an instant; but when we can play a small part in tikkun olam, I believe we must do so.
By the way, we don’t have a Pasadena equivalent to the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network… yet!
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