SILVIO FITTIPALDI
When Mary Hopkins asked him how his weekend was going, he replied, “It’s mixed, very mixed.” Later he decided that was good. The good and the bad were together, and that was stimulating. After all, the opposites need not always be unified. A powerful sense to contend had come to him through Rachel Hillel’s talk and he was reminded on the intense contention he has had and many people, including biblical persons, have had with God. This is a powerful dimension of the Jewish tradition; to contend with God, to contend with order, to contend with rigid forms.
He also had felt the need to contend with the reconciliation of opposites in becoming whole, wanting to irreconcile opposites and to keep them that way. He was feeling fragmentation, uniqueness, individuality. He has been close to the world of Zen and found himself contrasting its sparseness, simplicity and emptiness with the richness in symbolism, dream and fantasy of the world of Jung. But Zen’s emptiness can encompass the world of Jung. It holds reconciliation and irreconciliation.
Silvio described his changing feelings and attitudes toward his outer and his inner worlds as they had developed from his childhood. At first he did not recognize a split between an outer world of reading and baseball and an inner one of contemplation. He simply acted. In fact, when he joined the Augustinian Order at 13, he gradually found it to be a mixture of the active and contemplative.
However, when he entered a seminary, he had been unaware of the concept and reality of social justice. Later this seemed incredible. He came to realize that justice involves integrity and discovered that in the book of Isaiah the biblical word for justice is often translated as wholeness or integrity. Injustice was a disintegration and a breakdown of wholeness. Both wholeness and sin in himself and others were parts of his world. By the end of the 1960’s during which he had developed a deepened understanding of the Pauline image of the body of Christ and the spirit of the Buddha, he was becoming aware of the interconnections between himself and the natural environment. The inner and the outer were still joined, but their parameters were growing.
In the 1970’s while still continuing to recognize “the seemingly unified universe” intellectually, he became split emotionally.
In January 1981, after listening to Rachel speaking about being “in the service of divinity,” he thought this is to serve the earth. It reminded him of the Hasidic tradition described by Buber in which it is said that our responsibility is to liberate the sparks of the divine. This leads to the hallowing of every day.
Thus he must ask himself how he participates in that liberation and how he blocks it. In his outer life he participates by teaching, dancing, and writing, and by supporting the work of Amnesty International. But he blocks it by his involvement in racism, sexism, exploitation, and pollution.
He spoke of Rachel’s “endurance in choice” and how that related to the choice he has endured for 30 years as an Augustinian. He had intended to be a “doctor of the soul.” Taylor Oughton had suggested that perhaps (in Henri Nouwen’s phrase) he was “a wounded healer.” After seeing the phrase the next morning in Beth Kingsley’s article in Inward Light, he thought to himself, “I’d better begin to pay attention to that.” The wounds in himself and his wounding of others are part of that wounded healer. Thus the question of disintegration and the non-reconciliation of opposites is important to him. The word “cleaving” has two senses – to hug and to separate. The way of healing for him is a “cleaving with and from others, a realization of my connections with others, an allowing of the energy that is passing between us to follow in what I call our cosmic, divine, and human network of relations …”
Silvio’s final thought related to his deep awareness of limitation. He had heard the suggestion that polarities of the outer world might be reconciled creatively in the unconscious. He thought to himself, “That feels good,” and he thought to himself, “It doesn’t feel good.” And he added “I feel that (the polarities) can be taken in and worked on either with the images of the dream or the images of guided fantasy or unguided fantasy, with the images that come to me through my writing of poetry, an image I’ll just grasp and be carried by for a (few) pages. At the same time to enter that world of the whole, the world which Jung would call the Self, that world which is intimately connected with the ego, means that in some time when that arises to the surface again, it seems to me, it will be formed in a limited way. And the form that it takes cannot be the whole, and won’t be the whole. And while I might be attempting to be compassionate and hear the other with whom I may be in conflict, when I make a choice, I am taking a stance which is limiting at that point. And I can work hard that the limitation will not be impinging on the form of the other person, or the other situation.”
“And that led me to think of the upmost limitation I have felt at times, the limitation of broken relationships, broken relationships which quite possibly might not develop again. It reminded me of an experience of last year. I wrote this about it:”
suddenly, unexpectedly,
the storm rose,
quietly, dark clouds covered the sky,
a crack of thunder,
a soft voice,
streak of lightning --
summer storm in the depth of winter,
in the wake of Christmas,
the voice said: “No longer.”
a small tree was uprooted
from the soft earth of humanity;
connecting branches torn asunder,
violently with gentleness . . . .
and the storm passed,
leaving the bared, wounded earth
to recover itself from its nakedness,
to cry the soft, gentle tears
of healing that would never
close the rupture.
Silvio concluded his talk with an Hasidic story of Rabbi Menahim Mendel of Kotz that gives him hope. It showed that at some place in one’s life one may have nothing to give any more. When one is empty one can and must move on. In contending with wholeness, he discovered that there are times when one “can be whole in being empty.”
SILVIO FITTIPALDI is teaching religion part time and participating in a program of Family Therapy at Hahnemann Hospital as he begins a new career in private practice. As a college teacher he has taught and lectured on a variety of subjects including “Religion and Psychology.”