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February 21, 2006
Pastoral Theology LIVE: Helen Flanders Dunbar Memorial Lecture at New York Presbyterian Hospital Columbia Medical Center, February 10thfeatures Princeton Seminary associate professor, Robert Dykstra, Ph.D. by Bonnie McDougall Olson, Resident Chaplain, NY
On March 10, 1876 Alexander Graham Bell uttered these famous words to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, who was sequestered in an adjoining room, "Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you." And with those words the telephone was born. Some 130 years later, on February 10th, 2006, the words, Are you there Little Rock? would launch the first nationally teleconferenced Helen Flanders Dunbar lecture from New York Presbyterian Hospital to the University of Arkansas Medical Center, Little Rock, Arkansas; WakeMed, Raleigh, North Carolina and the Veterans Administration Hospital, Denver, Colorado. (Unfortunately, the WakeMed connection failed, through no fault of its own.)
The annual lecture at New York Presbyterian, draws strong attendance from the New York/New Jersey metropolitan pastoral community and has consistently offered significant speakers such as Robert Powell, Marcia Dunbar-Soule Dobson, Myron Madden, Donald Capps, Rodney Hunter and James Hillman.
Dykstras lecture, Loser as Guide: The Spiritual Quest of Early Adolescent Boys engaged listeners to reflect on the painful challenges and disappointments of early male adolescence as important and necessary building blocks in male spiritual awareness and formation. Dykstras exegesis of the term loser showed the term to be socio-culturally unique to males rather than females, having had its roots in the burgeoning industrialization of 19th century America which fed the bootstrap myth of the self-made man. This myth helped make synonymous a mans success or failure in external accomplishments with the nature of his inner character. On one end of the continuum was the self-fulfilled man, the winner and on the other the man who had failed to achieve his rightful destiny, the loser.
Loser was the one who stood beyond redemptive possibility, the one who seems outside the reaches of God and his state of being lost contagious to his peers. Such thoughts are more than common ones to early adolescent boys who fight to maintain and feed the myth of the winner in themselves. This winner identity for the pubescent boy works to split off those aspects of the self which do not fit a false gender ideal; that which is considered feminine is dismissed or even denigrated in ones self or other male peers. Sensitive and self-conscious non-aggressive boys fight an even tougher battle towards peer acceptance and self understanding of wholeness.
Dykstra posited that the many turbulent challenges that rock the adolescents youth are far from fruitless but, in fact, the very ground upon which spiritual self-awareness is rooted. Only by embracing the abnormal or the loser in oneself, can the formative youth hope to engage the fullness of his unique potential. With every failure of youth, the adolescent scores a parallel victory. Dykstra denotes that success and failure, winning and losing are inextricable and create a complex web of possibility and choice for the adolescent that allows him to understand the failure of writing an essay, for instance, as his success at refusing to meet an authority figures demands upon him!
The loser myth also fosters a kind of splitting of the soul from the physical body which reinforces the young mans understanding about his own sexuality as less than soulful or spiritual, and negative.
Dykstras story about his own childhood growing up as a loser, spiritually minded, intellectual and not very athletic illustrated in a real sense, the need for a deeper understanding of the ongoing unconscious choices being made by male adolescents as well as American society, to promulgate the myth of the self-made male. Only when young men are affirmed and encouraged to begin to accept and explore their own complexity will titles such as loser and winner begin to lose their power to stultify spiritual growth.
Dykstras exploration of the adolescent loser as spiritual guide can equally be applied to young women who face parallel challenges to be the mythic model of a female winner. The popular media standard for physical beauty is dictated by super thin high fashion models, sending many young girls into dieting cycles that lead to anorexia and bulimia and potential death in order to be winners; anorexia the deadly psychiatric illness remains, in many ways, an illness that society would prefer remain in the closet. While males may be seen as winners for their intelligence, women historically have had to find ways to apologize for their intelligence in order to succeed. Helen Flanders Dunbar, considered the mother of the CPE movement is such an example. Dunbar, despite her credentials as a psychiatrist and theologian, dropped the name Helen so that her peers would not discover the winning writer was actually a female loser in disguise.
Dykstras plea for a more compassionate, holistic understanding and nurturance of the burgeoning adolescent self is a call to all of us as mentors and pastoral caregivers to help midwife those youth among us. Perhaps, before we can do that that, we first need to engage Dykstras invitation to revisit the buried remnants of our own loser identities, our struggle to truly fit in and belong. Dykstra promises it will prove to be a critical spiritual guide.
Posted by Perry Miller, Editor at February 21, 2006 10:56 PM