JOSEPH HAVENS
All through his life Joe Havens has been concerned with the relation between the inner and the outer. He has a continuing dialogue with this conference and within himself about these two sides of his existence.
Some years ago he attended a week long group relations conference and participated in an inter-group exercise. Small groups were to act so as to enhance their learning about inter-group behavior. When his group decided to “take over” another group, he was amazed to discover the extent of his emotional involvement. He was really into it! Since other group members were responsible for the decision, his own aggressive feelings were free to surface where he could recognize them. These feelings inside himself, stirred by an outward event, resulted in an “inner dialogue between the responsible, quiet, analytic, thoughtful side of me and the gungho, get ’em side.”
Joe feels that “God speaks through outer events to us fully as much as through an inner voice.” He perceives Elijah’s hearing God in the still, small voice as “a corrective” to the early Hebrew tendency “to see God in many kinds of outward events” and the need of the individual “to take some sense of his own sinfulness as perhaps causing this outer event which came back. So there’s a dialectic here going on all the time between what happens out there and how we assimilate this, and how we feed that back into our behavior out there.”
The guilt Joe has, perhaps, always labored under as a result of his position in society, sharply increased at the time of the Vietnam war. He was drawn out of his study back into social action, and became more acquainted with the political and economic roots of the war and the exploitation of the Third World by the economic imperialism so rampant in our day. The persistent news of the outer world kept the dialogue going between the “get on with your life, Joe” and the Joe who kept saying, “Joe Havens is responsible.” The analogy between the Germans who just didn’t want to know about what was happening to the Jews, and the man who was doing nothing about the manufacture in his own state of small arms being sent to repressive regimes in Third World countries, is one he doesn’t like to think about. He added “I’m not proposing that guilt is a good motivator, but guilt is.”
Joe’s movement back into social action took several directions. Through the Movement for a New Society he has been involved in studies “of the systematic basis of the evil in the world and of the arms race.” He has gotten help in his guilt work from Robert J. Lifton, who worked with Vietnam veterans and “who began to distinguish between what was a neurotic level of guilt … and what was legitimate guilt about what they had participated in.”
Lastly, he has shared with Joanna Macy in her “despair work, … helping people deal with their despair, revulsion, fear, horror, and anger about the state of the environment and the possibility of nuclear destruction.” In addition to his life-time concern with helping people with their emotional life, “it fits with my need for a new way of understanding the world spiritually.”
Joanna Macy’s Buddhist perspective on networks has been very important to him. Feeling “part of a network of people concerned about changing the way things are … helps us to deal with the emotions inside us stirred by what’s happened out there.” We are “freed to do something and not to feel the whole of the thing down on our shoulders, because we have comrades … Where sharing doesn’t occur … the paralysis continues …”
“The main thing I want to say is that God speaks to us from outer events and from the inside too, and … both of these are important in the modern world … If we’re concerned about wholeness, both dimensions must be included somehow or other. The dialogue must go on.”
JOSEPH HAVENS has had a long and varied career from industrial engineer and Quaker conscientious objector, worker with Blacks improving row housing, through Jungian analysis and the study of psychology, teaching at Wilmington and later Carleton Colleges, eventually becoming a psychotherapist and community health worker. A practicing Buddhist Vipassana, he is primarily interested in relating spiritual life to social action.