I have a sense of how seemingly ordinary young men suddenly are radicalized by an ideology...Leftist, Rightist, or Jihadist...and become violent terrorists. The immature male psyche...isolated, ungrounded, disconnected...is drawn to an abstract world of ideas, policies, politics. I know because I have such a psyche. What attracts is not exactly fantasy, nor psychosis, but the abstraction of ideas. Women do not seem drawn to this obsession with ideology. Only some men are. The female enjoys an inherent harmony within the brain: the Left and the Right, the discursive/analytic and the contemplative/intuitive/artistic. In right order, the analytic/discursive/abstractive enriches ones engagement with reality. But the immature male, isolated and disconnected, falls easily into toxic disassociation. The ideas, policies, ideology, programs, and conflicts become far more fascinating and arousing than one's own actual life. It is a disassociation similar to daydreaming, delusional thought, hallucination. It resembles also another pathology of exaggerated masculinity: autism in its personal disconnect and fascination with objectivity. It is symptomatic of a fractured male psyche: lonely, isolated, unhappy, unhinged and in flight from reality.
My Double Life
So, I have always lived a double, a secret life. "Fleckinstein" itself is obviously a pseudonym, a "nom de guerre" (war name). My actual life is quite ordinary and dull: husband/father, H.S. teacher, supervisor, boarding home director, and so forth. Nothing too exceptional. But my secret life is fascinating: I am a philosopher, Culture Warrior, contemplative, sage, theologian, prophetic voice, psychologist/anthropologist/sociologist, student of history, critic of culture. I am a Catholic, intellectual Walter Mitty: camouflaged covertly beneath a mundane life is an exhilarating life of the intellect,
This started in adolescence: I liked pickup basketball but was not athletic, didn't talk to girls because of pathological shyness, worked a number of jobs but mostly caddied, studied appropriately, moderately engaged in classes, and practiced my faith in a steady, sincere but low-affect manner. Life was safe, serene, pleasant, unexceptional, dull. But I was euphoric when I had a book in my hand. Fiction, history, current events, psychology, theology...everything! From the comfort of a large, modest, working-middle-class family, this amazing cosmos opened its miracles to me in reading.
This stepped up a notch towards the end of college, age 20-21, 1968-9, as I studied philosophy, especially nineteen century and medieval thought. At the same time from the tranquility of a seminary I considered the monumental changes shaking our society and Church. My librarian mentor Pat Williams encouraged and stimulated me. Summer at Ivan Illich's think tank in Cuernavaca heightened the ecstasy.
Example: around sophomore year of college I read Summerhill, the account of a British "free" school where children are unburdened by any mandatory curriculum but spontaneously respond to a rich environment of educational resources. I became fascinated and obsessed. I told my father, an intelligent, down-to-earth, union organizer. He thought I was off my rocker. About three months later I read Bruno Bettelheim, a hardnosed realist psychologist who destroyed the fantasies of progressive education and argued that all children, but especially the poor, need structure, direction and order. I absolutely renounced Summerhill and went strong conservative on curriculum. My adolescence and early adulthood was one of reckless, high-energy intellectual promiscuity.
This trajectory continued after college: now out of the seminary but without career direction, I fell in love, courted my wife-to-be, worked parttime teaching ESL in South Bronx. That was my real life. But my secret life continued: I studied theology with holy, learned Jesuits and the best liberal Protestant theologians at Union Theological.
My first real, fulltime job, religion teacher in a tough, Jersey City, Catholic high school brought me into painful contact with reality. For four years, this was not an easy job. But in 1973, age 25, I went into an entirely new intellectual/religious zone. We made Cursillo and then dived into the Charismatic Renewal. To this point, my Catholic faith was steady, but burdened by an obligation to serve the poor and a persistent, low grade liberal guilt about that. With Cursillo/Catholic-Charismatic our lives changed: we were now swimming in God's love, directed by the Holy Spirit, receptive of the Word, immersed in a cult of praise. No more social justice guilt! Lots of joy, praise and expectant faith. For about half a dozen years I remained more or less in a mild ecstasy: happy, loved, excited about moving forward in God's plan.
This was a religious awakening, but also an intellectual one. Sharp lay intellects like Ralph Martin and Steve Clark drew from Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism to vivify a Catholicism under attack from Cultural Progressivism. At the same time, outstanding priest theologians (Francis Martin, Killian McDonald, George Montague) plumbed our Catholic tradition to show its consistency with this startling renewal. I could hardly be happier: a passionate religious and intellectual movement, deeply Catholic and yet ecumenical. While mainstream Catholic academia was moving left into progressivism, I was pulled into the opposite direction: a splendid marriage of the Evangelical/Pentecostal with uber-Catholicism. Happiness is...!
My Hypo-Manic Episode
This renewal is defined primarily by the "baptism of the Holy Spirit": a spiritual experience of the movement of the Holy Spirit (previously received for Catholics in baptism/confirmation) characterized by: a turning to Jesus as Lord and Savior, repentance from sin, expectant hope, exuberance in communal praise, speaking in tongues, affective reception of the Scriptures, prophesy, the felt guidance of the Spirit, an urgency to share the faith, and more.
We were encouraged to seek and surrender to interior movements of the Holy Spirit: praise in tongues, prophesy, interior guidance, and such. Participating regularly in prayer meetings, conferences, spontaneous gatherings constant reading, I maintained a steady, mild state of religious, intellectual excitement. This was probably a degree of hypo-mania.
For example, one day while walking with my wife and friends in NYC I felt overwhelmed by the love of God and was aware that most of the people on the street seemed like lost souls, unaware of this love. I dropped suddenly to my knees and begged Christ to make me a vehicle of his mercy. This took maybe 60 seconds. When asked I explained directly what I was doing. In the charismatic world I inhabited, this was not strange. Not that everyone did it, but I was constantly reading testimonies of such happenings so I simply emulated what I was looking at. Later I learned that word spread and there was rumors about my aberrant behavior.
Another time, aware of my fear of the gangs of wild dogs I would sometimes meet while running, I was "led by the Spirit" to go and seek these gangs and confront them. In this I would overcome fear and enter more deeply in my God-intended masculinity. Well, I went in search but found none. What to make of that? Divine inspiration or hypo-mania?
And my confrontation of our pastor Fr. Ed Joacim. He was a gifted, charming, artistic, eccentric priest very involved in jail ministry. I was enchanted by him and joined him in visits to Hudson County Jail. With time I tired of his obsession with the jail; and then I became annoyed. With the faux confidence of hypo-manic grandiosity, I confronted him in the rectory with "fraternal correction." He became quite nervous. He will appear again a little later.
Then our drive to Princeton. One hot summer, Saturday after noon we decided to take a ride to Princeton and walk around. We had no money. (Parenthesis: From May 1975 to November 1976 I was without steady work. I left my HS teaching job get better pay. For 6 months I taught religion in our local St. Paul's Elementary School. Other wise, I hunted for a job, loaded trucks, painted peoples homes, worked on the Ford truck line, and kept busy. We never were hungry, but had almost no money. I, but not our families, was entirely serene about this; mostly in the quiet euphoria of the charismatic renewal.)
Driving home, I received a clear interior voice to go into an office building we were passing. There was one car in the lot. We entered an unlocked door and found a single office open. A young man, about my age, was sitting there. We engaged him and learned he was a Church architect. He seemed in low mood. He had studied the theology of Rudolph Bultmann. This is a defective liberal theology which denies the actual, bodily resurrection of Jesus and interprets the entire Gospel as a subjective experience, by the disciples, of a spiritual awakening which they interpreted into the Resurrection appearances. So we received this as an obvious opportunity to share the real Gospel: that Jesus was indeed risen, that the tomb was empty, that we were all destined to share in eternal glory. As we left, we rejoiced in confidence that we were being led by the Holy Spirit. Is that crazy?
Next, a bizarre if harmless incident. We are directed to randomly enter a bodega and ask for a pack of cigarettes for free. Neither of us smoked; neither of us wanted to smoke. But we obeyed the interior direction. Our request was declined. We continued on our way. Harmless, but definitely strange!
The next was more interesting. We pass a nice house with a big pool and are directed to visit the house and ask to swim in the pool. We didn't have swim trunks and didn't really want to swim but we did obey these promptings. We have a pleasant conversation with a nice man who assures us he would like to welcome us but his wife would not allow it. In accord with my reading of the time, I recognize that the man is submissive in fear of his wife and it is for us to invite him into his full masculine responsibility. I exhort him to disregard his wife's wishes and take responsibility as head of the family, to make his own decision, for or against. We get nowhere with this so we part congenially, continue on our way, satisfied that we are complying with the promptings of the Holy Spirit.
Wise, Loving Priestly Interventions: Fr. Paul Viale and Fr. Ed Joachim
Fr. Paul was our dear friend, associate pastor, a holy, gentle, humble priest. He came to visit us and asked if I would like to walk. He asked how I was doing. I talked for almost an hour, as we walked around my neighborhood, about how we were experiencing the Holy Spirit. Emotionally and intellectually I was high energy, agitated. He listened and nodded, listened and nodded. He did not say a single word. Did not correct, advise, counsel, instruct. Actually, he probably did not know what to make of it himself. The stuff was ambiguous: largely harmless, some of it interesting, possibly fruitful, definitely strange. But we were living in this charismatic world where miracles were not just possible but expected. Risk taking was encouraged.
When I was finished, I looked into his eyes, awaiting his response. Again: not a word. He had no thought on the matter. But what he convey, nonverbally, was a profound respect, a tender care for me. I took this in. And immediately, something deep within me changed. Nothing cognitive. Deeper than the mere emotional. Very quiet. I felt loved, safe, grounded and peaceful. My agitation and hypomania evaporated like the early morning fog in the sunlight. Peace. I never returned to that state of excessive interior hyper-activity.
And then our pastor at Christ the King, Fr. Ed, the one I had confronted. Perhaps weeks later, in our prayer meeting everyone agreed to pray over me. I don't recall the reason. It was not dramatic as if I was in trouble and needed prayer. We were always praying over each other. I happily sat, opened palms up, closed my eyes. Everyone laid hands on me and prayed in tongues. At a point I opened my eyes and saw Fr. Ed in front of me. He was praying for me with eyes closed. There was a prayerful, tender, reverent look in his face. It struck me like a truck: this man really loves me1 I broke down into intense weeping. I realized my error: I felt distant, ignored, unloved by him. It was that underlying, unrecognized feeling of rejection that had infused my earlier confrontation with a quiet, covert resentment. A "father wound" was miraculously healed. A lie...that I was unloved by Father...was unveiled. I was, not so much the prodigal as the older son: I should have known but somehow didn't know this love. My own father and many father figures had always loved me but somehow I had been deceived and suspicious. My relationship with authority was decisively healed at that moment.
Conclusion
In the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, we were urged to seek, welcome and surrender fearlessly to promptings from the Holy Spirit. But equal in urgency was the instruction to discern: to submit them always to the community, especially the leaders, including obviously the priests. I still believe the Holy Spirit directly, personally communicates with us. But looking back on these incidents, I see them as a deliberate invocation of the subconscious by a psyche in some degree lonely and unconnected and so in a hypomanic episode. The real miracle: the pastoral love...the affection and respect...of these two fine priests. Amazing: these men ordained to teach and sanctify did not engage my agitated, grandiose intellect, but simply loved me in a manner both fraternal and paternal. They really loved me. I got it. I received deeply the comfort and serenity of the Holy Spirit.
Father Paul and Father Ed, Pray for us!
Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and enkindle in us the fire of your love, send forth your Spirit and we shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth!
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