Victim or Player: Marc Gafni

Victim or Player
Auschwitz Birkenhau

Marc Gafni
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The dance of the subject and object, the movement between the two is the great and undulating dance of our lives. It is the perpetual dance between the victim and the player.

If we are an object then we are acted upon and done to- we are not actors and doers. The larger mysteries of life are beyond our ability to fully grasp and we seek to find whatever subjectivity we can in the midst of the sometimes gracious
and all to often cruel objectivity of human life.

The tragic inadequacy of the being in object relation to the world is that we lose so much of our aliveness, not to mention our power and dignity. The object all to easily becomes the victim who ceases to be a player in his or her own destiny.

Naturally then, when we wind up in places that hurt we blame drivers other then ourselves for the choice of our destination. While this has the advantage of perpetually reaffirming our innocence it has the shadow of forever confirming our impotence.

For the price of innocence is impotence. If you are not part of the problem then you most certainly cannot be part of the solution. All that remains is escalating cycles of recrimination and demonization.

And yet life is filled with realities in which one is in fact, a victim. I spend all of yesterday in Auschwitz-Birkdenhau, the extermination factory.
It is a story I know well and have lived in the innermost cells of my body as long as breath has moved in me. But to see and walk through the women’s barracks, a place not fit for any sentient being, designed to degrade and crush all that is human and holy, is to be pierced by pain and sorrow so intense that it cannot find location in the garb of words.

Victims who were reduced to objects.

Yes, some of these men, women and children were able to retain their subjectivity, their humanity and to silently defy their objectifiers. Many,some say most, were not.

What is clear however is that we owe them everything in their victimhood.

It is not only Auschwitz however. We are sometimes, not often but sometimes, faced with oppression of terrible nature and consequence in our lives which at its core renders us victims; objects of a karma, or dehumanizing wave of hatred or negative energy that we can do little to stand against. We are victims. We are objectified, reduced and de-humanized. Often by the most respectable of people under the guise of the most noble of goals.

In these situations as well there are places and pockets in it all, in which we can retain our humanity, our subjectivity. We can do this by holding on to our sanity and joy in face of the blackness insanity; we can do it by being love- by being love even in the face of fear and its fabrications. We might also be able to do so by identifying the ways in which we contributed to our own suffering. All this is not to excuse the torturer but to locate the locus of our own dignity and power. For it is only that which we have created, which might be a pivoting point for change and healing.

At the same time we dare not over extend our subjectivity. This is the great mistake both of classical religion and contemporary New Age dogma. Both place the human being at the center of his or her own reality. Both gorgeously reject the stance of victimhood and demand that the human being accept responsibility for the circumstances of his life. In different ways they both loudly and proudly assert, “Your life is your creation”. In every moment you are creating or dis-creating the reality of your life. Do not cry more then it hurts. You think you are victim; perhaps — but now turn it around and realize that perhaps you are the predator and victimizer, a reality you have hidden from, in the dogged insistence on your victim status.

Yet this seemingly noble teaching and world view is infected with hubris of enormous proportion. It is a denial of all humility and all mystery. It is the usurpation of the role of the creator, Prometheus unbound. In the desperate apotheosis of the subject, the object moment in human life and relations is heretically denied. We begin to blame the victim, desperately seeking his culpability in order to ward off our own vulnerability. We need the amulet of the guilty verdict of the sufferer to protect us from the fear that we might be the next of victim- objects of the mysterious and seemingly arbitrary working of cruel and capricious circumstance. We become callous and indifferent and invent every manner of reason to re-betray the betrayed; in the word of Wilihem Riech, to murder Christ again and again.

It is only in embrace of the object and subject together that sacred union is realized and balance is achieved. It is the dance of the subject and object that integrity shows its face, ethical integrity, psychological integrity and spiritual integrity.

It is in this context and with this backdrop in mind and heart, that I want to share with you a liberation moment of some two hours in duration which suffused my being yesterday morning before our trip to Auschwitz.

In this liberation experience a space of insight was opened and I realized again what I already knew but this time from a deeper and more real place. The realization entered my body. It moved from being merely an intellectual position or even a heart murmur to being a fully embodied incarnate reality.

More later…

Marc Gafni
Posted on marcgafni.com
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