Not Me and the Sin-Eater

Reflections on dissociation provoked by an old Irish ritual

Don’t tell Finn, my now 13 year old grandson, that I used this old picture. I couldn’t resist sharing that impish smile with you!

It’s a few days after St. Patrick’s Day and I still have the “It’s Great to be Irish” banner on the wall.  It belonged to my mother-in-law, Mary Dunn, whose mother, born in Ireland, was Bridget Dunn. Mary didn’t name her daughter Bridget because in this country when she was growing up in the 1910’s, an Irish maid, no matter her given name, was called Kitchen-Bridget. “Kitchen-Bridget, clear the plates!” 

Well, we did name our daughter after her Great Grandmother, and I can assure you no one would dare to call that spirited red-headed Bridget, Kitchen Bridget. How far we Irish have come from the days when “Irish Not Apply” signs appeared in all the windows up and down 49^th St.  

Progress. That’s what we call the distance between when my family, hungry and landless and forbidden by the English even to fish, got on the boat in Cork in the mid 1800’s, waved goodbye to parents and grandparents and an ancient spirt-filled landscape we’d lived in for centuries — and now.  A little under two hundred years. The blink of a faery’s eye in human history. 

Progress and success. One generation after another in my immigrant family, like so many other white European families, achieving enormous amounts of it. True, there was sadness and loss: a trolley took the life of one great grandfather when it backed up on its trip down 6^th Avenue and a great grandmother died on Carrol St. in Brooklyn in the pandemic of 1919.  But no one in my family and no one in my school or my church ever recognized the dark side of all this breathless success.

Have you ever heard of sin-eaters?  They are part of an old Irish ritual. At the funeral of a loved one a sin-eater is appointed who would be served a plate of biscuits which had been laid to rest on the body of the dead person and had absorbed the sins of that person.  Once eaten, the soul of the deceased would be wiped clean as a newly laundered white sheet hung on a clothesline, blowing with the wind, warmed by the sun.  God knows what happened to the sin-eater.  Maybe she got fat on biscuits or maybe she died a terrible death, rotting inside from the shame of all the wickedness stuffed into her body.

Let’s take a little time to examine the sins this country was founded on.  First, there is slavery and all its repercussions which, as we know now, were even more brutal, more extensive, more prevalent, even here in New England, even here in Freeport where the manifest of Captain Rufus Soule’s ship, the Susan Soule, recorded as freight: Caroline, 25, female, black; Harry, 5, male, black;  Godfrey, 1, male, black.  At the same time slavery was making George Washington one of the richest men in America and our economy was “growing like Topsy,” we were busy declaring the Native Americans savages and the Reverend Thomas Smith from the First Parish Church in Portland was offering bounties for the scalps of Native Americans who dared to think of this place where they’d lived for millennia as home. 

We aren’t a dead nation. Yet.  But ever since we were born, America has been feeding our sins to a sin-eater, hanging ourselves out as pure and good and blessed.  We are just barely beginning to process this dark side of our identity, of our past and our present, and, as we do it, the opposition grows more vicious and more defensive and projects its shame and its rage onto those who are trying to speak and witness the awful truths of our very existence as a nation. They want someone else to eat our sins: gay and transgender people, all Black people, immigrants at the border or in our cities, woke liberals.

For America to survive we must be able to process the harm we are capable of: the way in which our greed for land or wealth blinded us to the harm we inflicted not only on all our Black brothers and sisters and on the the people who lived here for 10,000 years before we arrived, but on the land itself, which we have now so rapaciously despoiled that our future as humans on this planet is now seriously in question.

It occurs to me here to think of the earth as our sin-eater.  We’ve dumped our plastics in her ocean, carbon from our carbon dependent lifestyle into her lungs, petroleum-based fertilizers onto her once fertile soils, food waste into landfills causing more damage to her lungs, burned her forests for steaks And we keep doing it even though she is getting very sick.

In my mental health field, we have a name for this process of handing our sins to a sin eater in order to maintain a sense of ourselves as a pure and good person.  We call it dissociation. The process has a lot to do with identity.  It’s a not me mental processing pattern.  Sure, I hurt that girl’s feelings when I called her dumb but she’s a jerk, and I am a good person, so I’m not to blame, no, not me.  Sure, I paid for scalps of Native Americans, but they weren’t really human, and they didn’t believe in our God who reassures me I am among the chosen, so guilt, shame?  Not me!! 

Look at what happens when the book “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story” comes out, every chapter designed to put the shameful story of slavery back into consciousness. Furious choruses of not me can be heard all over America.

I witnessed an experience of not me in my writing class last week. We were at the end of our 8 weeks and exchanging our work with each other for comments.  After reading my two last essays, one of the students was angry that the piece was asking her to think about her moral responsibility to the climate breakdown. Not me, she said her voice rising and her anger bursting out of the Zoom screen and into my bedroom. “It’s the System that’s responsible for all this. Not me.” 

I can sympathize with her resistance to processing any culpability her lifestyle or her worldview may contribute to this moment when we are on the brink of calamity. I’ve lived for a very long time with my own high level of dissociation about the harm my success is built upon and the harm my once mindless consumerism has caused the environment.  Processing it brings all kinds of feelings: great sadness and grief, remorse, guilt.

But it also brings great opportunity to think outside the small box that is the story of America the Land of the Free or America the Land of Opportunity or American the land of Crate and Barrel catalogues glistening with glass tables and woven yellow rugs. That small box separates me from knowing the relationship between my actions and the natural world, between this land where I live, surrounded by new growth forest, a half mile from Maquoit Bay, and the people who lived on it before we settlers arrived and threw them out or massacred them or starved them to death; or between me and 5 year old Harry who was transported on the ship named for the woman, Susan Soule, who climbed the same stairs, looked out the same window, toiled in the same kitchen as I did when I lived in Rufus Soule’s home all those years.  

I wonder if you, reader, feel any of the same sense of expansion, of a deepening of consciousness and a growing compassion and connection which this months’ long examination we’ve done together has opened in me?

Take anything.  Take the butter dish.  We have a new cat. We call her Sweet Pea. She’s only a few months old, a Maine Coon Cat.  She loves butter.  The top to our butter dish broke years ago, so when we aren’t looking, Sweet Pea jumps up on the counter and heads straight for the Kate’s butter.  In “the old days” I would have gone uptown to the kitchen store and examined all the butter dishes on offer and tried to find the “nicest” one.  Maybe white porcelain or perhaps a glass butter dish, maybe with a little glass knob on the top. I would have considered the word cost from the narrowest point.  Is this butter dish worth, let’s say $20, or is that too much to pay?  Now I think about cost a different way. Would it have been made in China, shipped here on a boat? What resources go into butter dishes anyway? Clay? Silica?  How much carbon does it take to fire one of these up in a ceramic oven?  I evaluate that and think that price is too high, no need to take any more resources from a resource depleted world for my one butter dish. I cover the butter with a wooden bowl and think the problem solved.

The next day, Bob, the man who’s always happy to be out and about on a household chore, comes home with a package wrapped in newspaper.  “Look what I found at the thrift store at FCS,” he says, handing me the package. “They sent me to the basement, and I found it there.” I unwrap the paper and there it is, a white pocelain covered butter dish that looks exactly like the one that broke.

Or take food. Food is no longer a history-less clump of yellow or white stuff I plop on my plate, food now has a whole story behind it: the Somali Farmer who grew the grains for the Maine Grains cornmeal I use for my scones, the oyster farmer who lives in Freeport, the chicken farmer who lives in Bowdoinham whose chickens run around his backyard and get fed food scraps from restaurants, The yummy Heiwa tofu made in Rockport by a small family business.

Or take the spirits I encountered last fall while walking in the woods who whispered to me from the shadows. Happily, in the sometimes magical way change happens, it will soon be possible to learn the stories of these spirits and the history of this land I live on. The silence is starting to break. For years, Freeport’s celebrations and descriptions of itself were all centered on the valor of white colonial settlers.  But now, the new Director of the Historical Society understands the need to tell the story of Freeport’s history both before we white folks arrived and at the time of colonization. In April, his board and other leaders in town will come together to experience a Wabanaki Reach educational session during which we will explore the history of colonization.  Now finally we can talk about this.  Now the spirits can teach me how to live on this land in a different way.  Now I can be more fully present when I walk in the woods and I won’t feel so alone.

Dissociation depletes our spirits. Keeping all those feelings and mental processes at bay so that one can say not me drains the body of energy, closes the mind to associative process that are creative and compassionate, keeps our world small and our imaginations confined.  In all that confined space we are more lonely and isolated from the pulse of nature and the stories of our ancestors…all our ancestors. 

America isn’t a separate mind.  We can’t knock on her door and ask her to sit with us and have a cup of tea and reconcile the evils of her past.  America is the sum of each one of our minds which makes up what we call culture and what we form into myths.  Story by story, each by each, we need to process these harms, until, hopefully, our myth about our goodness and our land of endless bounty changes and with humility and wisdom and compassion and interconnection, our minds now altered enough to see the path ahead more clearly, we embrace a whole new way to go forward.