I was recently in Grand Junction, Colorado, to officiate the wedding of some close friends (May 10th-13th, 2024). It is both a humor and a pain that multiple friends have asked me to officiate their weddings at this time in my life, which is unequivocally a period of loss and grief. I have never felt so disoriented, stuck, and wounded. And my friends are here to remind me that they trust me to, and want me to, speak at length about love and relationships in front of their loved ones.
This is a helpful reminder, and I trust that my friends understand me more clearly than I understand myself. At this moment, I am hurt, disoriented, and lost. I am unsure of my strengths, capacities, and lovability. There is something about my friend's invitations to officiate, and the way that people responded to my speech and presence at the wedding, that reminds me of who I am. It helps me see the deeper layers of my nature that are currently obscured by the grief and pain I have been passing through.
And, I mean, come on... Its a little bit ridiculous, horrifying, and comical that the loneliest and most painful years of my life are also the ones in which friends asked me to speak publicly at their weddings. Its an absurd reminder of how lonely I've been, how much time I've spent single and alone, and how much my life has been vexed by my desire for romantic partnership. I have tried to bear the ambivalence gracefully, or take in the bittersweet quality of these experiences as much as possible, without forcing the experiences to mean one thing.
Additionally, 4 of my cousins are getting married this year between June and September. The universe is just kicking me in the face with other people having something that I want and have never really 'had' in a satisfying way. A common experience, I'm aware.
And in this moment I am unsure, even doubtful, that what I really want or need is a romantic partner. Such an ambiguous and ambivalent wanting...
The Colorado wedding was remarkable in part because I got to experience my friend Eric's extended family, who are spread out over the state. Eric's grandmother, Grandma Jill, was a particularly powerful presence. I learned, prior to arriving, that Grandma Jill was the real 'matriarch' of the family, setting the tone, being a powerful, organizing presence within the family. Eric indicated some of this energy in the final email before the wedding. There he had a section called "Things we'd like" which had 3 numbered points pertaining to wedding needs. The very first point was: "1. Please don't just go in Grandma's house without talking to Grandma. If you don't know who Grandma is, come find me (Eric) and I'll introduce you, and then you can ask permission." This is a striking sentence, delivered with an assumed familiarity that betrays strong family bonds. Eric did not say, "MY grandma..." but simply "Grandma..." There is no need for qualify her as MY grandma. Her existence, apparently, is too singular, established, and known. Its like walking into a new bar in a new town and someone says "Oh you don't want that mess to be on the floor when Janette gets here..." The name Janette, in this example, is spoken with gravity and depth, and implicit weight. "Oh, shit, Janette..." A stranger would be left with the feeling that a person of gravity and prowess was being referred to.
"Don't go into Grandma's house without talking to Grandma..." Eric's capitalization indicates the type of gravity that I'm talking about.
Part of me wondered: Should I be afraid of this woman? Is she volatile, aggressive, or worthy of caution? What is the power that this woman wields that is so clearly being indicated here?
Put differently, Eric's way of referring to her frames her as someone worth deferring to (or at least, ro be deferred to for some reason, worthy or not).
Here I am raising the question of what we defer to and why we defer to it. Notice I say WHAT we defer to and not WHO we defer to. What is worth deferring to can never simply be a person (or an institution). Yet there are things worth deferring to.
Things worth deferring to, here, I will call 'arche'. The word 'arche' is an ancient Greek word meaning 'principle', 'originating source', or 'cause'. The word has more nuanced meanings in Aristotle, who I have read a lot of, but his nuances escape me.
It is the word arche that gives us our words patriarch or matriarch. A p/matriarch is a person that stands as a type of origin or source, a 'mother' or 'father' in the broad sense of 'point of origin' or organization.
Grandma Jill is a matriarch in a way that my mother or grandmother wasn't. What does this mean? I crave the presence of a genuine matriarch, or a genuine patriarch. Why would I crave this? Isn't patriarchy a gross, corrupt, and unjust notion? I certainly agree with much contemporary feminist or critical writing about patriarchy. bell hooks, for example, was on the right track with her string of adjectives describing our contemporary political regimes: "white-supremacist capitalist imperial patriarchy..." Of course...
So when I say that "I crave a m(p)atriarch," I do not mean that I endorse or support or crave patriarchy as it exists now. I'm too steeped in queer thought and experience for that to be. Its not me.
There must be other meanings, a real arche rather than this bogus arche we have now. I will call this legitimate arche versus corrupted arche.
The difference between a legitimate or a corrupted arche could be understood through two different meanings of the word power. Sometimes the word power means domination, force, or violence. This is what we mean when we critically say that "politics is all about power," or "they really abused their power": we are talking about people coercing one another, mistreating one another. Patriarchy, as the term is used nowadays, points to a network of institutions that enable some people to dominate other people. Wealthy people dominate the poor; the educated dominate the uneducated; whites dominate POC; so on, so on. I am not interested in this type of arche, for violence is never a true arche, never really at the root of things (however much Hobbes wants to insist on this, i.e. 'nasty, brutish, and short', or however much our society wants to found itself on Hobbesian notions, like Weber's claim that the state is simply an entity with a monopoly on legitimate organized violence).
Violence is not a real arche. Real power is not violence.
The word power means not only violence but also potential or capacity. I may call a book, a poem, or a movie 'powerful'. When I call it powerful I may mean moving, insightful, thought-provoking, or challenging. In these cases the word points not to domination but to things like growth, potential, learning, or change. Something powerful can also be something transformative.
A person can be powerful in both of these different ways. When a person misuses their power we call them a bully or say they 'throw their weight around'. When a person is in their power they don't need to announce their power, it is felt or known. As Nassim Taleb observes, as soon as someone says "I'm in charge here," you know that they absolutely are not in charge. Something like this is said only when power is slipping away, when someone feels themselves out of control.
Real power is always implicit, and to explicitly declare power is always (typically) a sign of weakness, vulnerability, or fear.
Grandma Jill at no point announced herself as a powerful person, made no claims to being in charge. She was unassuming in her presence and small in her stature.
But her personality, her presence, seemed to ground the space somehow...
Is this just what I want to feel? Did I see her that way because Eric primed me to and because I need to see that in the world?
I have been so horrified by the lack of elders (arche) in my life. I have a few aunts that I admire, respect, and look up to. They are elders of a kind. They certainly offer me love and nurturance. But there are limitations. They are not my parents and they do not participate or intervene in the affairs of my nuclear family. It is in my nuclear family that I have felt the lack of elders, the lack of a patriarch or matriarch. There are no leaders.
Of course this is what I want and crave and do not have. I recently told a friend of mine about this question and they said "I've never seen someone act that way..." I was describing to them a type of presence that I craved. When I first began this essay I left myself a note that concisely captures what I'm talking about. And this note answers the question I raised above: WHAT is worth deferring to? (With the WHAT here being radically contrasted with WHO).
I wrote to myself: "What is a matriarch? What is a patriarch? When those words are used crudely they point to domination. When they are used more powerfully they point to someone attuned to the energy as it moves in human communities, someone who is grounded in themselves enough to take in the reality of others without their own reality feeling compromised. In being grounded enough to take in the reality of others an arche is able to make decisions beyond the ego, for the family, the tribe, the community, the group..."
I added: "It is this failure for an ARCHE to appear that has so hurt me in relation to my own family. My grief is mine and mine alone... No one understands or seems to want to understand..."
It is those two notes that provided the impetus to this writing. I will briefly say more about what I mean in my description of an arche above.
Again, I defined a legitimate arche as: "someone attuned to the energy as it moves in human communities, someone who is grounded in themselves enough to take in the reality of others without their own reality feeling compromised. In being grounded enough to take in the reality of others an arche is able to make decisions beyond the ego, for the family, the tribe, the community, the group..."
This is actually a bizarre formulation as I look at it. What is "the energy" that I refer to in the first sentence? And what does it mean for a person to attuned to "the energy"?
I'm pointing to psychological dynamics around something like egoism, or a preoccupation with oneself or one's image that interferes with or distorts our understanding of the world and others.
I am talking about how it is possible to perceive reality more and less clearly. Being able to perceive reality more clearly, I seem to be saying, has something to do with being able to take in the reality of others, to understand that other people have experiences that are both alike and different from our own.
For whatever reason, it seems easy to fall into something like egoism. Darwinism selfish gene blah blah blah, arguments about inherent selfishness are a dime a dozen.
But what about the experiential process of trying to become more attuned to others or less blinded by the immediacy of our own self-involved, bodily and psychological needs?
Many wisdom traditions, especially Buddhism, are so concerned with egoism and the learning required to live in a less egoistic way. It takes work. We have to learn to work with awareness and attention, train ourselves to see less automatically, to take things in as if they were strange. We have to work on consciousness from within consciousness. This process is both deeply bodily and also completely non-physical/spatial. Being attuned to another person (listening), for example, is deeply bodily: I'm sitting, my ears are taking in sound waves, my brain is doing things. But then the experience is one of being aware of or sensing things that cannot be physically located.
And I don't just mean stories and concepts. I mean something that I can only call energy, the aura of a situation, how it feels to know that there are things behind me that I can sense without seeing or touching. What is this sensing?
This sensing is the lived bodies intimate relationship with reality. Invisible threads everywhere, everything the world interacting with itself, everything a single clay differentiating itself into the many beings that share both identity and difference.
Why do some people exert gravity on social situations? Why do some people exert magnetism or power more easily than others?
I am ready to be done writing, but feel compelled to acknowledge the subtitle of this writing: "Thoughts on a Wedding and Its Spiritual Organization."
All this time I'm trying to talk about 'spiritual organization'. My speech was about the meaning of 'places' as distinct from 'spaces'. Here I'm talking about something very similar to what I said there. Places exist when people are united by some form of spiritual organization that is both larger than them and generated by them.
Because the world is in the process of unfolding itself and we are one of the many things it has unfolded from itself. The world's self-unfolding is invariably orderly. Nowhere do I see chaos (but of course I understand why we talk about violence or pain as chaotic).
We have emerged from the orderliness of the world and seem to have brought new, distinct forms of orderliness with us in our emergence.
We know not only the order of our bodies and the fruits and the earth and the sky; we also know the order of making. Human life is impossible without making (homo faber). We invariably use tools, as do many other animals. Yet we transform our worlds more fully, our amalgamated artifacts come to constitute a world for us. It is this network of tools and their implied purposes that human beings chiefly experience life and the world.
The order generated by making (the world of artifacts) can obscure the orderliness of nature, a more emergent, spiritual order.
A legitimate arche (m/patriarch) is one who is not so lost in the world of artifacts and human goals, has not forgotten the spiritual world, the emergent order that constitute the deep structures of experience. The ego thrives in the made world of human artifacts. "Go get a job, be a fancy person with lots of money, succeed within the system, and then you'll be happy." This is the most familiar problem in the world by now. But here I am saying it differently.
The ego is necessary. We must have our jobs and our rules and our roles. We must function within the human world in which the made order pre-dominates. But the made order is only possible on the basis of a deeper, spiritually felt order, the order of the world in its self-unfolding.
Truly skillful human living, and thus the possibility of genuine leadership or nurturance, seems to depend upon gracefully navigating the tension between the made order where egoism thrives and the deeper spiritual order in which the boundaries separating persons begin to thin.
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