MW: Could you say more about what the gift was you’ve referred to?
MR: It’s one of the hardest things for me to even think or talk about. I would hate to use a language that makes me sound like a religious zealot. I’m too sickened by the Jimmy Swaggarts of our day to want to sound like that for one second. I don’t have a vocabulary for describing the profound nature of this spiritual awakening and powerful religious experience of feeling chosen as a conveyor of something very important.
It was a call. I was called by these people out in the streets, and it was a joyous call. That call has been the best thing in my life. To this moment, I’m not too sure where it will lead, and at times I doubt whether it was ever there. But it doesn’t usually take long before something happens to bring me back to it. The thing that leads me to trust it, and to kind of relax about it, is that the people it attracts to me are great crap detectors. So I don’t have to worry about it. The biggest danger of having this gift is that I will misuse it. That would be a sacrilege I could not bear. With people around who helped me enjoy it, and keep me from getting into destructive patterns, I don’t have to worry about ruining it with my neurotic and Jewish scrupulosity: have I deserved it? What do I have to do to earn this? What if I misuse it?
There’s a problem with this that I haven’t resolved by any means. It’s complex. It’s a sense that I don’t have anything to do with the gift. It’s easier for me to play a self-deprecating role in relationship to it, than to look at the responsibility of it, the joyous responsibility of its being mine, not something I’m merely passing along. I worry that I’ll not exercise the gift fully out of some limitation in my development that keeps me from accepting the gift—a feeling that I’m not worthy of it or something. A big part of me is just totally astonished that I have this ability, and that I am in this position where these wonderful people do so much for me and support me.
As a result of this doubt, I sometimes act in very self-defeating ways and hurt people, because I can’t really believe that they have the depths of commitment that they do. (MW: They have a personal commitment toward you and the work, and that’s hard for you to believe in?) Yeah. Let me see if I can make that clear. I think that’s important for me to do. It can be very frightening to me for someone to be so committed to what I’m doing. I back off from that. I don’t know what to do with it. Fortunately, some people have called that to my attention and told me of the hurt they feel, and we’ve been able to look at it. When people I admire so much, people that I see as politically and spiritually and personally evolved, choose me to have an honorable position in their lives it’s more than I can handle.
One time my son Rick, he was six—yeah, this is getting at it—was sitting on my couch next to me during the height of my private practice days when I was busy, busy, busy. I always had a close loving relationship with my children, but they grew up in too much awareness of my busy-ness and not enough of my accessibility. He was sitting on the couch next to me. I became aware that he’d been there for over an hour not watching television or anything. I asked him why he wasn’t outside playing. He said, “I just like to be with you Dad.” Shortly thereafter he went out, and I started to cry and couldn’t’ stop.
There’s a big thing that goes on inside me. It’s scary for me to let it in. It’s like too beautiful, too strange. I don’t know all the complexities of it except that I really block on it, and then I look very cold and rejecting to people. I think it’s a self-concept limitation that I just have trouble getting it through my consciousness that this is wonderful and OK, so just enjoy it. I have that same block about the gift.
MW: A lot of what you say has a spiritual and political resonance, but you don’t frame it in typically socialist or theological terms. How have you coped with claims on you to declare yourself to be a spiritual or political person of some variety or other?
MR: That’s an exciting question. I think one of the greatest gifts I’ve had relates to what you are saying. I was never exposed to formal religious education. The Bar Mitzvah syndrome has to be separated from religious training. I never knew a damn thing about the Jewish religion because I never heard a rabbi speak. I never went to a synagogue service. My parents came from Orthodox backgrounds and they kept kosher, but they never went to synagogue, because they moved around so much, and were never part of a Jewish community. At eight or nine, I had never been around a formalized concept of what the religion is, so I didn’t have anybody telling me what God was about. I feel in retrospect that I was lucky not to have my mind bent in a certain direction at an early age.
You see, I had a clear question that I was trying to answer: what is healing for people? What leads people to be violent? I was obsessed with that question. I still am. I wanted to know from anyone who knew, how we can teach ourselves a different way of living, so that we can create entirely different rules by which we distribute resources and resolve differences. This violence is craziness. Let’s get rid of it. Let’s stop it. Why should people hate themselves? Why should people hate one another? This should have been resolved centuries ago. It’s crazy.
Not having the constraint of formal religious training, I come at the question with a hunger to learn what anybody—Christian, Jewish, Marxist, Buddhist—could teach me.
I was free to select whoever I thought had something to offer, and if they were Christian, fine. I found lots of good stuff in Christianity.
I learned a lot from Catholicism from a priest, Paul Donahue, and a nun, Mary Ann Gleason—powerful people, loving, open people. One thing I learned a lot about was the struggle over chastity. Paul and I had some powerful discussions about that. At that point in my life, I could identify with how advisable it might be to be a priest and not have any family connections. With small children and flying off and being in all these things, I was really in two worlds. I was called on to do priest-like work, and yet I was caught up in secular responsibilities.
Mary Ann and Paul got me connected with the Berrigan-type Catholics, and I made connections within that community that have lasted over the years. A big part of my learning is from the liberation theology movement generally, and the Catholic Berrigan-type people, particularly. I had the great advantage to live and work with them daily, with the feminists through Vicki, with the black leaders through Al. It was a great education, a great opportunity to be part of that community that continues to this day.
The other advantage I had was not to have been in the military. I am very glad not to have had to devote any years to doing that. Relative to other people, particularly other men, I think I’ve had a low exposure to patriarchal institutions. My father is a very laid back non-authoritarian, very generous, compassionate person. So I have less stuff to have to rebel against, and haven’t had to waste much energy in psychological liberation from that stuff.
The Community Council for Mutual Education in San Francisco was a turning point in helping me get a vision of how I might use the power I have. At one time, I tried to use it as a clinician to heal people individually. I could see that was putting fires out perhaps, not addressing how to prevent them. Then, as I said, I learned from Hakeem of the potential dangers of this role, no matter how well-intentioned I am. The profession as a whole is based on the premise that these people are sick, and that’s blaming-the-victim. And, why am I just serving the affluent? All of that was turning up in me a need to figure out some other model for doing what I did. I started to give my services, instead of to individual affluent clients, to people on the firing line, like Vicki and Al, and others fighting on behalf of the human rights of various groups.
These forces merged into a great opportunity in San Francisco—the Council for Mutual Education. Vicki was the director, but basically she and I evolved it. Losing the chauffeur and all that lead to the idea of helping a local group of people and empowering them to pass on skills to others. Recently, it dawned on me how evolved that project became. We had people we had organized and trained – training other people to train other people. We had reached out into Livermore, California and trained a team of their counselors and psychologists to pass things on; we had gone over into Berkeley land worked through the schools there, and we had worked in Oakland, and we were close with Marcus Foster. We had reached about eight or nine suburban areas around there. We had been in every school in San Francisco.
I can, when I look back on all of that, think, how naïve and idealistic I was—we accomplished nothing. People I worked with committed suicide or got sick because of the stress of the work. One day I was in a real funk about this and I explained it to Dick Bianci. I said, “Dick, I was very naïve in 1970. I came out here, I had this opportunity to do something good, and I see now how naive I was to think you can change this kind of stuff with the kind of effort we made.” Dick said I sounded Hollywoodish, and reminded me of a call I had just had from a black woman who said she was using the skills over all these years and was ready to start the work again. That helped me to see that seeing us as simply having failed at our shot of ridding San Francisco schools of racism and sexism is false. It helped me to put into focus what a miracle that was for those years to get a group of people who could do so much with no money and our own limitations as people, the fight and the struggle.
My point here is that, while I have had questions about what we’ve accomplished, the San Francisco experience gave me the exciting concept that we could start local projects to train masses of people in the skills, very quickly with no money. I had an opportunity to go to Norfolk, Virginia to do the same thing. Norfolk was integrating its schools. I was able to pull together thirty people there, and I had a very emotional, very fulfilling four years in Norfolk. In each case of course was the problem of keeping this alive with no funds. I’m still trying to work this out.