Two Victories in Tong Fior: Following the Lord of the Dance

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One brief note

This was originally posted and then hidden from public view, not exactly as being wrong, but as being a mediocrity. I am making it available now, but I do not consider it excellent.

In Tong Fior Blackbelt: The Martial Art of Joyous Conflict, I whimsically called myself a martial arts grandmaster, having the striking credentials of having studied three separate martial arts and failed in all three.

But there are a couple of events that happened recently, something that amounts to self-defense in a more usual sense of the term. Let me give them in reverse chronological order, and let me offer a framing perspective for this thing.

Walking on water—for ordinary Orthodox!

In Tong Fior Blackbelt: The Martial Art of Joyous Conflict, I wrote:

The canonized saints trample on the rules of nature again, and again, and again. Saints walk on water; one monk, the only one on a monastic coast worthy to retrieve an icon miraculously floating on water, when he absolutely had to do so, crawled on top of the surface of the water on all fours like a dog, because in his great humility he considered himself utterly unworthy to stand up normally and walk on top of the water like Christ did.

A bit later in Tong Fior Blackbelt: The Martial Art of Joyous Conflict, I make an important connection between saints and more ordinary Orthodox:

Furthermore the God who works in the heart of hearts to giants among the saints is also works in the hearts of the faithful. Monastic giants trample on scorpions with bare feet; many more faithful trample on pride. Majestic saints open the eyes of the blind; and men reject lust and find their sight truly opened. St. Paul the Apostle raised the dead more than once, and innumerable more among the faithful, across many centuries, have fed the hungry; and furthermore, in a point that many, many officially canonized saints have driven home across the centuries, feeding the hungry is greater work than raising the dead. The term "saint" referred originally to every member of the Church without exception, and one and the same God works in every stripe of saint to ultimately transcend the chasm between what is created, and what is uncreated. The wall between God and we who are merely created is there so that we may rise above it.

And the ordinary faithful can and do, at least at times, trample on the rules of nature. Ordinary faithful can and do take decisive action without being able, and perhaps not even trying in pretension, to get their ducks in a row. And they are less solipsistic than the rest of us; they recognize that God's Grace allows impels us to leap before you look and land on solid ground if you see something through your inmost heart but not with any eyes save those of faith.

What I have to discuss is baby steps towards walking on water, in the ordinary faithful sense, because it is in fact possible, for Orthodox who will never be canonized, to trample on metaphorical water as they trample on literal pride. And in fact, there is an idiomatic statement that someone "walks on water" that is not intended or received literally, but a statement that someone can do amazing things. The image is significant.

This article is lost if it is only taken as a note on physical self-defense. Part of it is about the Lord of the Dance whose Grace exceeds all measure, and the strength flows from Grace through synergy with our genuine participation, but a martial artist would have every reason to say, "Dude, that ain't martial arts skill on your part. You were just astonishingly lucky to hit home on one kick, and don't count on such luck in the future!" And if I hear such a remark, I believe I would remain silent, but my opinion is that this represents neither martial arts skill, nor sheer luck, but God's providence and synergy.

It has been stated that miracles occur to cover for human weakness, and those who do miracles usually don't want to be there. This may be because God wishes miracles to happen without injuring our precious humility, and however much people try to show respect by saving another person's pride, God wishes to save something infinitely better: our humility. And I would like to discuss two ordinary-grade miracles in my own recent experience.

A safe place

I was in a highly impaired state when I called my doctor's office and asked to make an appointment. Within a little bit of phone tag, I was told to go the ER, and never mind about making an appointment. Shortly after that, I was told I had reached a safe place. This was a good thing, because by the time I eventually reached the safe place, I was running on something like one neuron.

Once I was in the safe place, I was approached by a man who wanted to order me around, and I obeyed the first time or two before saying an unchanging "No." sluggish thoughts ran through my mind, one of the first of which was, "He's getting ready to be violent with me."

Then he punched me in the face hard enough to knock me to the ground.

After about a second more had passed, I thought, with my mind moving like sludge, "I should kick him in the groin." I managed a weak enough kick that astonishingly connected, but a kick that hit him hard enough to slow him down. Then, after another second or so's delay, I thought, "When you're in a self-defense situation, you're supposed to make noise." So I shouted, "HELP! STAFF!"

Hospital staff arrived, and soon separated us. I was given a CT scan for my head that came back squeaky-clean, and the person who was responsible for sutires looked more closely at the wound and said it was a shallow enough cut that stitches were not needed.

I am, incidentally, grateful that I was running on one neuron at the time. I do not seem to have injured my fellow patient above inflicting pain; I received no injury worthy of any real treatment. I surprised the staff by declining medication for pain ("Wow! High threshold of pain."); I was bleeding but did not feel pain worth the bother to medicate. The reason I am grateful I was running on one neuron at the time is that if I were running at full steam, I would have hit him way harder. The most obvious choice would have been to drop to a fighting stance, with arms in place to at least try to be ready to block a blow, aim for a hard knee kick to the groin, followed by an even harder kick to his ribcage meant to send him sprawling, followed by standing with my foot over his windpipe for however long help took to arrive. And that's more force than I would like in dealing with someone who wasn't genuinely trying to harm me, just somebody who's trying to be a tough guy, and the preferred response in Kuk Sool Won was to let the other person be the tough guy, back off and lose in every way socially if you think it would help at all. The great gunfighters of the West, or at least the ones that survived, would all be much happier to buy someone else a drink than get into gunfights. They might have been successful in the duels they fought, but they did almost everything they could to avoid as many duels as they could.

The #1 preferred response is to run away, preferably run away screaming or making lots of noise, but I have an old knee injury that means that if I try to bolt away, I will be on the ground in profound pain. I'm not billing myself as someone strong who won't run, just someone weak who can't do so without begging for self-inflicted injury.

Or as was stated in Kuk Sool Won, after giving numerous subtle and potent techniques, the instructors said, "If you're in a real self-defense situation, go for the knees," and had us practice kicking hard at knee-level pads. Or as Marines chant, "Ra, ra, ree! Kick him in the knee! Ra, ra, rass! Kick him in the other knee!" I believe that either response on my part would have been treated legally as an open and shut case of self-defense, but in my weakness God gave me a much less forceful way out of things. Also, when someone in scrubs told me that I that I could press charges, and I simply shrugged it off. What I only thought of later as something good to say was, "He has his personal problems and I have mine. I neither wish, nor see the need, to trade places." Also, I had been getting a bit bored, and staff TLC made for a minor change of scenery.

I regard the encounter as providential, the work of the Lord of the Dance who would help me outgrow my solipsism. And it turned out better than I would have achieved had I been operating at much more than one neuron. There is a core concept in some religions of, "I cannot harm you without harming myself." I've survived a long-term, painful knee injury. I am glad not to have inflicted the same on a fellow human being, even if he picked a fight."

Self-defense and dealing with police

This was an experience on a few more neurons than the physical assault. And I am intentionally using "self-defense" in a way that is other than the most common usage. I am not, for the moment, talking about hiking up a skirt and kicking, or using a knife or pepper spray, or mastering the basics of a simplified art like Goshin Jutsu.

After a harrowing and difficult week, it came time for a farewell visit with a friend. I was at this point really struggling, but I decided not to back down on this commitment, which might be my last opportunity to see that family face-to-face. He asked me when I would arrive, and I stated what I hoped, and I received no response.

A couple of hours after I went to bed, I heard a voice say, "Sherrif's office." I gave a confused "Hello?" and went to the doorway. There were three Sherrif's officers, who told me that my host was uncomfortable having me in the house with his wife and asked me to leave. (My immediate, unspoken reaction was, Wow, are the demons sore losers!")

They asked me some routine questions, but the one I remember most was close to when they wound down the conversation was, "So, this was some kind of really horrible miscommunication?"

What had gotten them to that point was that I was extremely calm (partly because I was sleepy) moving deliberately slowly, telling them (or asking permission for) what I wanted to do next, and being compliant, and the longer we spoke, the more puzzled, and even baffled, the officers appeared to be that someone had involved the police in this matter. They let me collect my belongings, and still had to escort me off the property, although I am not sure how happy they were to be doing their job in that moment.

Now what does this have to do with self-defense?

Everything!

An armored military vehicle

One time a year or so before, there was a truck show oriented to interest kids, and among police cars, ambulances, etc., there was a multipurpose military vehicle that I would loosely call an armored SUV, and more specifically an armored SUV on steroids. I asked some outsider's question about what the vehicle was intended for, and he responded. Then I went home, and realized I needed to say something more to him.

So I came back, looked down, and said, "Someone described service in Vietnam as, 'If you've survived two weeks in the jungle, a twig snaps and you're awake with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other.' I know you have one of the nastiest jobs out there, and you have my respect."

His response was beyond astonishment. He said, "And you mine," and his voice was suddenly at a much higher pitch. I think he took my remark to be astonishing for a civilian to get how hard an occupation it is to be a soldier, let alone state his job description in one sentence!

Now let's talk about police. I didn't open a can of whoop-ass, nor would I have done so even if I could. At least with decent police officers (including the ones from the Sherriff's office), you may not have bullying and power plays, but police work is not easy work, and military veterans who have gone the police route have often found that the work is terrifying.

One person explained it this way. Each time you have been pulled over by a police officer, you have known three things:

  1. You were (probably) unarmed.
  2. You did not have any kind of rigged booby-trap in your back seat as a weapon against police, and
  3. You had zero intent on murdering the officer.

No police officer who has ever pulled you over, has ever known any of these three things. And there's a reason why a police officer who pulled you over quietly rests a palm on top of his sidearm.

Police officers need to be able to self-protect, they know that things aren't always what they seem, and a situatio n can change in an instant. This means that one of the most basic concerns in dealing with a police officer who might be afraid, is to avoid giving any real or imagined reason, any surprise or startlement, to think they have to self-protect and kill you, and never assume that an action that is obviously completely harmless to you will be obviously harmless to an officer as well. Police officers aren't always perfect at reading minds.

The police officers seemed to be getting further and further from worrying about their own protection. I was, only in small part by my limits, calm, and emotions are contagious. In addition to this, I deliberately moved slowly, and told them what I was going to do (and at one point asked, and was immediately given permission to finish a glass of water).

I said "I wanted to close up my bag," which I had previously told them had a pocketknife (one of the officers said, "Don't take it out," but they seemed to show no further interest in my having a pocketknife in my bag.) Having told them ahead of time and moving slowly, they let me close a zipper that was remarkably close to my pocketknife, and for that matter the officers let me have practically everything else I wanted, and asked what possessions I had brought. My heart was in a (rather foggy) peace, and my actions left them less and less concerned about being able to draw a weapon quickly enough to self-protect. And on this point, I am less glad, but still glad, that I was in a mentally weakened state. I wouldn't have tried to fight, but I don't think I could have been so completely calm as I was, and here being full of calm is of infinitely more usefulness than the best firearm you own.

And on this point there is a story I didn't like when I heard it, where a knight was challenged by a dragon, and the dragon said, "If you'll come up to me and tickle the sides of my throat with your sword, you will have treasure worth more than rooms of silver and gold," and the knight went up, in terror, and the dragon bit off his jewelled sword at the hilt, then began to breathe fire and spewed the molten sword onto the knight's shield. The knight asked, "And what is this treasure?" before his horse began galloping away, and the dragon said, "Your LIFE!" and the knight ran away, grasping a treasure worth more than rooms full of gold.

What did this self-defense accomplish for me? Let me mention three things:

  1. As it turns out, I have been subjected to no legal actions at least for now.
  2. I was able to get out of that situation with all of my belongings.
  3. I was able to get out without an new hole in my chest or head.

The only other thing I can remember specifically being careful is not to reach for things until an officer has invited you to. If you don't have your driver's license and insurance card out ready when the officer comes, it might be wise not to reach for something in your pockets until the officer asks for driver's license and proof of insurance. (Police can genuinely have difficulty the difference between someone reaching to a pocket for a handkerchief, and someone reaching to a pocket for a weapon. If I really needed a handkerchief in one of my pockets, I would ask permission and move slowly.)

There is no silver bullet besides God here; God in his kindness chose to send me officers who aimed for the little disruption that was possible, instead of taking my behavior as suspicious. I do not claim that any of these three is a bulletproof shield; the bulletproof shield is that which moves with the Lord of the Dance who ever beckons us half-solipsists to enter a larger world.

And by the way, it's easier and safer to be with people to the extent that you understand them and can try to walk just a few feet in the other person's shoes. It may sound strange to say that police officers feel the safest with their guns and bulletproof vests, but it's really one of the most terrifying things out there, and you are distinctly safer if you understand it with a little bit of a police officer's eyes, and make a few simple changes to your behavior like moving slowly, asking permission, or telling what you intend to do (for instance, my moving slowly and saying I wanted to zipper up the bag which they knew my Swiss Army Knife was in), to avoid as much as possible making any police officer see a real or imagined need to self-protect.

And by the way, one accomplished martial artist I know did in fact know how to take a gun away from a gun criminal, as he practiced thousands of times, but his main comment about self-defense from gun criminals is that most people feel very uncomfortable if they are in a situation where they're pointing a gun at you and you aren't acting afraid. And there is something of this enshrined in the very Passion narratives in the Gospel. The words, "Don't you know that I have power to kill you and power to free you?" were only answered, "You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above." Pilate was positively terrified on a much larger scale than a gun criminal: he was the authority and he had all the soldiers and all the weapons; he had authority to kill at least some people at will; and yet this Man wasn't playing the game of a terrified criminal grasping at straws to escape execution.

That is something realized even outside of Christian trappings. One story in one of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books tells about a top negotiator who was confronted by gun-criminals and demanded to rob her. She said, slowly, "I don't want those guns pointed at me. It makes me uncomfortable." After an awkward pause, they stopped pointing their guns at her. Then she said, "I'm going to reach into my purse and pull out a twenty. Who's going to take it?" Then eventually one person indicate himself, and she handed him a $20 bill. Then the criminals ran away, terrified! She had not even asked for them to leave.

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, and it's better than the Druidic awen

One Anglican pastor, and a Marine to boot, commented that "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" doesn't mean I can wrestle down [name of a humble, gentle member of the congregation who looked like Gov. Schwarzinator, only beefier]. It doesn't even mean I can wrestle down my colleague [name of another man who also silver-haired and who used to eat glass]." But it did mean something.

In Steven Lawhead's Merlin, an (obviously fantasy) retelling of Arthurian legends, there is one point where Merlin enters what may have been an ambush, and time slows down to him and he moves, from everyone else's perspective, something like ten times faster than anyone else. He nimbly dances around, dodging a weapon here and striking an opponent there, until finally the book says, "He put a trembling hand out to touch me and I saw his mouth move, but the words were slow in coming. 'You can stop now, [Merlin]. It is over."

This is presented as fantasy, and is in a fantasy novel, but the phenomenon described as Merlin's awen is well enough documented in nonfiction works: The Dance of Life tells a documented tale:

Time Compression and Time Expansion

Time compression and time expansion are two objects of continuing fascination for [American and European] peoples. Time compresses when it speeds up. This is evident in emergency situations where one thinks one is about to die ("My whole life flashed before my eyes") or where there is extreme pressure to survive. An example would be the case of Major Russ Stromberg, Navy test pilot, testing the Carrier AV-8C. Stromberg had just been catapulted from the deck of the aircraft carrier Tarawa and he realized that his plane was not developing power. This eight-second scenario of what he dealt with the emergency and survived took forty-five minutes to describe. "I was very surprised by the whole evolution of the thing. Everything went into solution. After about one second, after about seventy-five feet after I started rolling, I knew I was in deep trouble" (italics added). First, Stromberg had to see if the engine could be brought up to power by switching off mechanisms limiting takeoff power. That didn't work. There was no way to get the engine up to power in the five seconds remaining before the plane would hit the water at over a hundred miles an hour and disintegrate. Ejection was the second option. However, to eject at the wrong moment would also have meant certain death. Even with only two or three seconds, he had the time to look around sothat he could pull the ejection handle at just the right moment: thirty feet above the water. Stromurg ejected and fortunately avoided the crash site by only a few feet. This meager description cannot possibly cover all the possible alternatives to decisions that Stromberg ultimately had to make—at the right time, in the right order, and without panic. If he had been on normal time, none of this would have been possible. If that capacity to expand time—in this case to about 300 percent of normal time[Sic; I believe the author meant a much more astounding 300 times normal time]—had not been built into the human species, it is doubtful that the human race would have survived.

This is called awen, loosely meaning 'inspiration' with a poetic center of gravity, and like profound giftedness and kything in Madeleine l'Engle's A Wind in the Door, that I deeply coveted, because it resonated with me, because in turn it was what I already had. I have never been involved in Druidry or initiated as a (Druidic) Bard, though it made mention on my egotistical character sheet; I might in some sense be called a bard in the sense that I am a writer with poetry as one instance, and it would be a surprising claim to be a poet without being a bard, but on a deeper level, 90% of this website is driven by awen that comes in many genres (and life outside of writing) and can almost never be summoned at will: all of the following are examples of awen on this site:


This is enough of a digression, or not a digression really at all; in Merlin, the awen, like the Spirit of the Lord falling on someone in the Bible, quite often is given as near-superhuman abilities in combat.

And what "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" means in relation to the three sherriff's officers was this: I was not, and am not, competent in general to overpower three police officers without getting hurt. (Nor stupid enough to try it even if I could.) I was given not an awen from the art of war, but an awen from the art of peace, and God used my weaknesses to keep me calm and help the police officers recognize that I was genuinely not a physical threat. And I left the encounter with something more valuable than rooms full of gold and diamond: my life!

It may also be that someday the Spirit of the Lord will fall upon me in a combat situation, and then "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" may open a major can of whoop-ass. I mentioned a couple of details about martial arts, where I have never tested above white belt cleanly, in my first martial art the instructors were pairing me with higher-level belts for sparring, eventually including blackbelt candidates and blackbelts. There was one balance sparring game where I was functioning at blackbelt candidate level or something else. I also took exactly one week to go from no rank to Sharpshooter, Bar VIII, innovating like a good athlete, and shot the target on Procedures for the Repair and Adjustment of Televisions two years out of practice on a gun that did not have its sight appropriately adjusted. (The soldier selling targets seemed a bit surprised when I asked to buy ten targets; but I did have enough stamina to shoot them all even if I flagged for the last 2 or 3.) And lastly, while firearms and pranks are not really a good idea, there was one target my brother showed me at home. It had two bullet holes in the larger white area of the target, and lead carelessly splattered near the top. I had squeezed off four rounds well into the black circle at the center of my target, waited for him to hit the target with a second shot, and then I head-on blasted the nail that was holding his target up, leaving splattered lead on the target face. (He wasn't able to hit the target after that.)

Ok; enough boasting; but all above firearms feats have been without awen. If God wants to give me some awen in the narrow sense for some physical fight (as he won through me the fight started by a fellow patient), he may do so. I would prefer something peaceful and ideally holding satyagraha at its heart, but God's ways often surprise us and are always, from a sufficiently great perspective, either what we wanted, or better than what we would have thought to ask.

And I would call both meeting my fellow patient, and meeting the officers, were miracles in the broader, everyday Orthodox sense. They were God covering for my weaknesses, and both were sufficient and in fact worked better in my already weakened state than if I were feeling more like myself.

That is perhaps, enough, but it really does say something about self-defense proper if self-defense is taken not only to include being able to provide violent defense in bad situations, but avoiding or improving bad situations. And while martial artists spend a lot of time on blows and joint locks, people where the martial art has taken proper root are fully willing and ready to run away screaming and completely lose in every sense socially rather lay a finger on their adversary in violence.

And you might review the section in Tong Fior Blackbelt: The Martial Art of Joyous Conflict under the heading of "God practices Ju-Jutsu..."

The seamless tapestry

Christ's garment was seamless, and this much, if it is true, is neither more nor less than one thread in a seamless tapestry. I had tried to establish community sites for "Luddite Orthodox", but this was wrong, not because of its irony, but because it is taking the greater-than-technological virtues of Orthodoxy and expecting them to stand alone.

Tong Fior, if there is anything in it to take seriously, is merely one thread by which one may rely on Providence, but that is really quite something. And if God is humble enough to make us co-workers with Christ, perhaps we might step aside from solipsism, materialism, atheism, and securing our own world, and follow the Humble One who leads the Great Dance!

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