The Path to "No Self" at the Henry Ford

The other day we went to visit the Henry Ford Museum. Matt was looking for stuff to do with me and his son, Steven, who is visiting for a week, and they have a Star Trek Exhibit there – the exhibit that actually originated in Seattle, because of Paul Allen, who was obsessed with Star Trek. The exhibit contains everything from the costume worn by Mark “Sarek” Leonard in the original “Journey to Babel” episode to a “KHAAAAAN scream booth” where we were able to re-enact the famous Shatner scream while watching a video of Ricardo Montalban.

Steven enjoying a classic beverage

I was looking at random historical artifacts, like the chair Lincoln was sitting in when he was shot (still has some bloodstains on it), and texted my friend Daren, who asked if there was a copy of Ford’s most famous piece of writing, “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.”  I said of course that was not there – but interestingly enough, this year marks the 100^th anniversary of the publication of Ford’s articles in The Dearborn Independent, and historian Bill McGraw wrote a wonderful piece in The Dearborn Historian, a city-funded historical magazine, for the occasion. Unfortunately, the mayor of Dearborn tried to suppress the article, and McGraw ended up losing his job.

Please do click on the link below to read the piece.  McGraw covers the story masterfully, from Ford’s huge influence on Hitler (he is the only American mentioned in Mein Kampf) to the recent attempts by the Ford family and the Ford Motor Company to make amends (the company sponsored the commercial-free showing of Schindler’s List in 1997; today the board chair of Greenfield Village is Jewish, etc.)

FDR's limousine

I thought the root word of "travel" here was interesting

Read the excellent article about Henry Ford's anti-Semitic views

Examples of captions in the official guide book that present a very simple (often single-sentence) version of a complex story: 

·       the 1978 Deere and Company no-till planter, which is part of the “Innovations in Planting” exhibit. “This planting method, which draws heavily on the use of chemical herbicides, also prevents erosion and conserved water for crop use.”

·       The Rust Cotton Picker – cotton was the last major American crop to be mechanized – "which put millions of African American farm laborers out of work, contributing to their mass migration to northern cities during the 1950s."

I am sure readers can fill in the complex details for themselves.

The piece in the museum that captivated me the most was a Romanticized small statue called something like “abolitionists listening to the story of an escapee.” This little piece sculpted in the 1860s depicts three white men, one of whom looks a lot like William Lloyd Garrison, listening raptly as an African-American woman (holding a baby) speaks to them. Their expressions are affectionate, concerned, horrified, solicitous.  The man who looks like Garrison is seated at a table and appears to be writing as the woman recounts the horrors of her experience. The other figures are standing. There was something about the expressions of the white men that held my attention – I know that today they would doubtless be dismissed as “white saviors” and that Garrison is often unfavorably contrasted with John Brown (there was a wonderful copy of the lithograph of Brown blessing a child as he is led to the gallows), but in that little statue I did not see “white savior” expressions (which I imagine to be smug, self-satisfied and paternalistic) on the faces. Instead, my gaze was held by the apparently genuine compassion and kinship I saw depicted.

Rosa Parks' actual bus

The Chair Lincoln was sitting on when he was shot

In The Heart of Centering Prayer, Cynthia Bourgeault writes “This ‘I’ I am trying so hard to purify, manage, and “realize” – this chief protagonist of my spiritual journey, this lifetime project I’ve somehow taken on, to improve it, find a truer vision of it, dismantle its false self and claim its true self, discover its enneagram type or its spiritual vocation, march it through the spiritual exercises or take down its secret soul messages through dream analysis – this self doesn’t really exist! It is simply the inevitable byproduct of attention flowing in the subject/object configuration, which creates the illusion of solidity in the first place…There is a deeper current of living awareness, a deeper and more intimate sense of belonging, which flows beneath the surface waters of your being and grows stronger and steadier as your attention is able to maintain itself as a unified field of objectless awareness.” (134) This statement implies a completely different experience of God’s presence than anything you can talk or write about. Thinking is of no use here – in fact, it is a huge impediment, as any practitioner of Centering Prayer will tell you, despite Father Keating’s repeated admonition that thoughts are an integral part of the experience.   

My thinking mind wants to categorize, to differentiate, to criticize, to dismiss – most especially, it wants to draw a clear line between myself and the Other, for the purpose of preserving my “false self” and its instinctual needs for power and control, safety and security, and affection and esteem. So much harder is the challenge to accept, to see all parts of the whole at once, to let things come and go, to accept people and events for who and what they are in all their complexity, to #embracetheconstant.