Our judgment of a misadventure

Let him without fault cast the first stone

I have in recent days been racked with grief at the loss of the son of a very dear friend in far-off Canada. For some, the death of a loved one is a time for coalescence and sympathy, and I am one of those some. For fewer, in whose number I also am, it is a time for introspection, and indeed for learning. Grayson Parris died by a misadventure, whose circumstances are unknown to me and, in large degree, unknowable, by me, by his mother and father, perhaps even by Grayson himself.

The circumstances are tragic; they are foreign, even were they for many of us to have occurred simply across the other side of a railway track. But I will not push them from me as being outside all and any consideration, because they are circumstances of this world and, now, they are circumstances of the next. And that is something that I refuse to push from me.

What follows is a statement of belief, a statement in which I may well err. For I am not omniscient. For I am not sceptical. For I am individual and, as an individual, I have something to say on this matter, which is of mortal importance.

Below is the statement I made yesterday to his kin. Grayson was of the Ojibway First Nation. I am its White Buffalo Man. He was my brother.

Bi’zhou

This is long. Get a coffee.

Grayson was injudicious. The West Coast of the US has been, along with the rest of the nation to a broad extent, rocked by two related phenomena, and I don’t quite know which I comprehend the lesser.

The first is the explosion, after the curse of crystallised methamphetamine hydrochloride, of fentanyl. And, the second, is the apparent insouciance of the sector’s operatives and LEA officials to the fact that the unwary are being taught in extremis of fentanyl’s rocket-fuel strength and so easily slipping into the red zone of a drug that’s supposed to be a recreational “nip” (to borrow a term from the world of the beefburger): if ever a sledgehammer were to crack a nut. 

I have myself in the name of “recreation” attended gatherings of gay men, where the rule rather than the exception was to indulge in flights of fancy. I came to that scene relatively late in life, but was immediately taken under the thumb of my then partner. He worked in intensive care in a city hospital in the capital and he had a great deal of insight, knowledge and everyday common sense, and a mystic side that was ... mystical.

He instilled in me three things:

- always insist to know what the product is and what advice he who offers it has for the event that a mishap should occur. He who has no such advice is a profiteering charlatan. Those whose interest errs more to the side of a social service — I have no tongue in my cheek — will outline the dangers of overdosing. I have spent many nights slapping the faces of the over-enthusiastically indulgent on such soporifics as “GHB” and “ketamine”, the anaesthetic that killed more World War I soldiers from overdoses than it saved in theatre;

- always, always, and not never: take half the dose proffered as “recommended” until one has the measure of its bite. Manufacturers’ warranties are unfortunately a rarity in such product sales. Oddly, there is one drug that actually generally comes with a maker’s warranty (not that anyone would invoke it): the ketamine they purloin from veterinary surgeons;

- finally, and perhaps the life saver. Would I could have talked to Grayson just a few silly weeks ago. It is this: in a moment of lucidity, however, seldom they may become and however specious you may consider the thought processes, during them, place this one thought at the forefront: know what it is you take drugs for. And make it the sole reason you take drugs.

Perhaps these paragraphs take you aback. Oh, I can assure you, I have no halo above my head, and not doing drugs or alcohol or smoking will not secure me, you or anyone a halo, either.

Halos — if we stick to the figurative notion and the concept of a “reward for holiness” — are not distributed to those who meticulously preserve their God-given bodies in a state of perfection over their entire three score and ten, or whatever it ends up being. It is the meticulous preservation of the soul, and the mind that nourishes it, that counts. There is a lot of Bible in the Bible. Pity the divinity student who must devour it chapter, verse and revelation. But devouring it is no prerequisite to getting a halo. No one gets halos by learning by rote. That said, I don’t precisely know what the prerequisite is to getting one: I’m not the one who doles them out. But I’ll lay you a dime to a dollar it’s got very little to do with the ability to recite biblical text. Nor does it likely have anything to do with the ability to understand Jesus’s parables or what “if you have ears to hear, then hear” means, apart from listening with your ears, which is, stunningly, nothing. Can you hear with your eyeballs?

Halos, or God’s favour, mercy and grace and a gold star in your heavenly exercise book, come from understanding. From deciding how you want everyone else to live, and then living that way yourself. From seeing light where there is light and nurturing it.

When I joined the Church of Scotland, I had nothing to say. I was baptised as an infant and probably wailed the place down around everyone’s ears. When I was a regular attender at St Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, I asked the best orator I have ever heard, who rejoiced in the magnificent name of Gillespie Macmillan, whether I could be confirmed and he said, “No.” The reason he said that is that we don’t do confirmation in the Church of Scotland but that I could, at a regular Sunday service, make a public avowal of faith, whereupon he would rebaptise me in the fellowship of the church. If I had any questions, he would answer them gladly. I returned some time later and asked him, “Is punishment under the criminal law a perversion of the doctrine of forgiveness that the church teaches?” To this he likewise said, “No. Man must regulate his society for the sake of good order. This he does wisely or foolishly, and never perfectly, but he never abates in his efforts.” God’s forgiveness is not dependent on man’s. But man’s is.

Folk often castigate God for allowing evil behaviour. Somehow a theory gets devolved that God’s ineffectuality in preventing evil abrogates us of any responsibility for forgiving people’s trespasses. So, I ask them, “What part of ‘love your fellow man as you would be loved by him’ exceeds your understanding?” What exceeds most folk’s understanding is the idea of law as a regulatory framework that should supplement and define our own innate sense of justice. Law does not impose justice; it is the tool by which justice is procured. And, sadly, it is the tool by which injustice is also procured. Because law as a means to regulate is so often construed as a means to subjugate. Law is a complex subject. But love is surely within man’s grasp?

Ordinary, law-abiding citizens break our laws every day and spare not a thought for it. As long as they don’t get a speeding ticket, that is. But there are some laws that come with an added extra bonus. It’s not actually in the statute as such, but there is a red ticket attached to these laws that says, “Sanctimonious charlatans may cite this law to procure themselves the moral high ground and to, if handy, erect an orange crate on which they may propound to others how innocent they themselves are and how damned and guilty the statute’s offenders are.” I am sure I must have seen this ticket on my travels, and if I haven’t, I wonder sometimes at the judgment, an act normally left to a wizened bench of bewigged legal experts, that gets, not so much handed down as booted across a tap room, like a half-inflated football. As if its propeller were Diego Maradona himself.

I barely knew Grayson. He was enough, however, of his own man to take parlous decisions about his own lifestyle, that offered him what he wanted from them, and I will say no stronger than that, for I am in ignorance on that subject. Nor will I judge him. If he broke the law, then let the state of Canada deal with that as the state of Canada must. Quite honestly, I believe that across the world, states deal so ineffectually with combatting what they declare to be a public enemy no. 1, that I have long since concluded in their complicity in the whole trade. The drugs trade flourishes because of one link in the supply chain: demand from consumers. Its booty ends up in Swiss bank accounts by the suitcase-load. I shan’t bore you with wild accusations for which I have no evidence: I simply point to a set of facts that beggar belief if they’re truly representative of the world’s crusade against drugs. It is akin to the unconscionable rate of conviction of rapists in the UK. Rape or sexual assault is a criminal offence that will, statistically, be wrought upon 1 in 4 of today’s female members of the population, and at least some proportion of the male population. That may be due to wily criminals who cover their tracks, or to clueless coppers who haven’t quite got to grips with a crime paraded with nonchalance even in Shakespeare’s play Henry V. But, if pushed to it, I must say I think 1% is a construct, of the police’s making. Who achieve a conviction rate of 1% because a conviction rate of 1% is what they want to achieve. No one is that ineffectual.

Grayson died of drugs. And you are rent apart by the thought that that didn’t need to be. Well, I’m sorry if I must break ranks with you; and I do so very unwillingly but I can offer these thoughts that may make my unkindness the more bearable.

It is true that some involved in the trade are ruthless to the point of downright unpleasantness. It’s been my rare misfortune to meet one or two of these people and they are reptilian in their coldness.  This was not Grayson, of this I am convinced. He was a regular guy with a habit, and he took too much. His appetite may have been conditioned by a desire, like as not it was. A desire for what? You almost certainly do not know. Only he did. But desires, which drive us on to goals in life, can arise other than in the individual’s soul. Some are planted by others; about some, we lie to ourselves. The halos that God distributes come not for a wholesome life or a clean criminal record; they come from intentions that bear the quality of averting harm for others, even if the desirer will acquiesce in his own harm. That is what wins halos: a grown-up realisation of one’s weaknesses and limitations, the courage to do battle with the demons with which battle is feasible. If Grayson deluded himself: he has reaped the corporeal result of his chemical insouciance. But he has not thereby crowned himself with any wreath of shame and nor must you so crown him. Jesus was only Jesus because he chose the outcasts of society to bring his message to. He set himself under endurance in the desert, and with temptations, and he lost his rag in the temple. Jesus was not Job.

God is not complex, and there is no set of facts propitious for a court case that would ever confound God or our ancestors’ spirits. If Grayson’s afterlife fate is to be called into question, then, first, it is no question with which we can concern ourselves. And, second, I know you. For the second time in a week, I find myself citing another’s character backbone in support of words for the behoof of another. And that is because your endeavours to correct the error in Grayson may seem to have have failed in your own eyes, which is a comforting, if over-simplistic, de facto analysis of a simple context. And then I must smile, because, at the moment when we believe that we have comprehended a complex factual situation, then we have indeed comprehended it, but only insofar as man’s comprehension is capable of reaching. But, for God, we are only starting on it. You may not have in the end prevented Grayson’s early departure. But it is partly because of what and who you are that he will serve well in the next stage of this great pony express of existence.

I am forward, and I beg pardon. But you are a leader of people and I offer no false flattery when I state my conviction that you were a leader of Grayson. I put no meal in my mouth but state things I know in my heart and that I know that you know. It is most sad that you cannot rely and lean on your own mother’s rock-steady faith in these times. You will of course have a wide circle, and the best of them will be there for you now. I may be 7,000 kilometres away, but I am with you every step.