A Seagull Named Papa

By Barry J. Robinson

A Seagull Named Papa is a gentle but powerful exploration of those aspects of our experience that invite and sometimes challenge us to develop such necessary human qualities as courage, compassion, tolerance, humility, patience, defiance, contrition and perseverance.

Get ready to laugh, cry and wonder at the deeply healing experiences of a violent ex-convict who is healed by a simple invitation; an eight-year old girl trying to recover from school-yard name-calling; a bullying supervisor stopped in his tracks; an eighty-seven year old woman who never got to say goodbye to her long-lost papa; and married therapists fortuitously visited by a clown.

Exploring such themes as humility, non-violent resistance, holding in sin, tolerance, poverty, redemption, contrition, the challenge of mercy, facing your inner demons and repairing the world, Barry Robinson invites you to listen for that insistent call that is there at the very heart of your life urging you to be who you really are.

This is an inspiring, fascinating and immersive read that will change the way you see yourself and the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: May 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781685623067

Barry J. Robinson

A Seagull Named Papa is a gentle but powerful exploration of those aspects of our experience that invite and sometimes challenge us to develop such qualities as courage, compassion, tolerance, humility, patience, defiance and perseverance. Using compelling illustrations from traditional tales, classic literature, scripture, psychology, film, history and his own personal and professional life, Barry Robinson relies on the ancient wisdom of storytelling in a manner, not unlike the shanachie of his Irish ancestors. You will be invited to laugh, cry and wonder at the profoundly moving experiences of a violent ex-convict who is healed by a simple invitation, an eight-year-old girl with freckles trying to recover from school-yard name-calling, a bullying supervisor stopped in his tracks, an eighty-seven-year-old woman who never got to say goodbye to her long-lost papa, and married therapists fortuitously visited by a clown. Drawing from many years of experience in caring for others, Barry invites you to explore your own journey toward wholeness and dignity. At the heart of this book is the author’s belief that we are “visited” by our “essential self” throughout our lives. The person we were meant to be, who was there in the very beginning, an essence that calls us to be who we really are. “If we take the risk of growing down, we may just find, indeed – I believe that we will ultimately find – that there are forces in the universe, both above us and beneath us that mean us well…beneath the very heart of things…there is a grace that means to make wonders of us in the end.”

Book preview

Preface

Growing Down

Perhaps the rediscovery of our humanity, and the potential of the human spirit which we have read about in legends of older civilizations, or in accounts of solitary mystics, or in tales of science fiction writers—perhaps this will constitute the true revolution of the future. The new frontier lies not beyond the planets but within each one of us.

– Pierre Elliott Trudeau

There is a wonderful scene in the film Dances With Wolves where the young army officer, John Dunbar, and the tribe’s Medicine Man, Kicking Bird, are taking a walk together along the bank of a river. Much has happened in the story up to this point.

Dunbar, a Union captain when we first meet him, has been terribly wounded in the bloody American Civil War still raging back east. His deepest wounds are not the physical ones. On the verge of madness, he mounts a desperate suicide charge against the enemy, hoping for death. His plan backfires. He not only survives but also receives preferential medical treatment and a military decoration. Now a lieutenant, his request to see the last of the real frontier is honored and he is promptly dispatched to the dangerous, uncharted wilds of South Dakota to set up a camp at Fort Sedgwick. The remote post turns out to be abandoned and the backup troops he is promised never arrive, leaving Dunbar alone in the majestic but unfriendly terrain.

It is not long before a nearby tribe of Lakota Sioux discover this alien in their midst. In their first encounter, both the small scouting party for the tribe and the young man narrowly avoid killing each other by accident. In spite of this harrowing confrontation, Dunbar overcomes his fears and risks approaching the tribe in a peaceful manner. Most of the Sioux remain suspicious of the white face. Nevertheless, the wise Kicking Bird admires Dunbar’s courage. As time passes, mutual respect and fascination with each other begin to develop between them, eventually hospitality and even friendship.

Members of the tribe slowly begin to invite Dunbar into their life, trusting him with both their joys and fears, encouraging him to learn their ways and asking him about his. He falls in love with a young widow, an adopted survivor of a slaughtered family of white settlers. Dunbar begins to spend more and more time with the tribe, adopting their dress and food, learning their language and assimilating their gentle way of living in harmony with the world around them. In so doing, he begins to leave behind the ugly memories and emotional scars of his past. Joy enters his life again, a simplicity of being and a new humanity. We are witnessing a man recovering his soul.

It is at this point that the two men, one the sole representative of his race, the other a respected elder of his tribe, are walking along the riverbank talking gently about the changes that have come to both of them since the day that they first met. It is then that the Medicine Man turns to Dunbar, now named Dances With Wolves, and says, I think you are on the most important journey anyone can ever make.

What journey would that be? asks Dunbar.

The journey to become a human being, says his friend.²

Growing Down

"Normally, we come into the world headfirst, like divers into the pool of humanity…Descent takes a while. We grow down, and we need a long life to get on our feet."³

This is a book about what psychologist, James Hillman, calls growing down and the emotional maturity that comes only from growing down. It is not the usual way we think of maturity. The prevailing culture promotes upward growth. Truly successful people are those who are seen to have made it to the top. To be an adult is to have grown up. But before tomato plants and tall trees can grow up, they have to grow down into the earth. I think the same is true with people. We have lost something by not seeing the necessity of growing down.

The ancient Jewish mystical tradition known as Kabbalah, as well as Christian mystical tradition, present a model for growth that emphasizes downward growth into human affairs and the places of the heart. Before a person’s soul can deepen into the life it was created to be, it must grow down into the darkness and despairing aspects of life. Buddha, you may recall, began the process of growing down early in his life by leaving the protection of his privileged life among the rich and going down into the streets where the poor and the sick and the dying drew his soul down into the question of how to live in this world in a truly human way.

There is an ancient Celtic symbol for this called the Tree of Life, or, in Irish, Crann Bethadh. It is a symbol for the forces of nature coming together in perfect harmony, indicated in the drawing by the roots of the tree interwoven with the branches of the tree. My Celtic Irish ancestors were quite likely Druids who believed that Crann Bethadh possessed special powers. When they came together to form a new settlement, a tree was planted in the middle of the plantation. They would hold assemblies beneath it. It provided shelter, food and acted as a home for wildlife. Life without it would have been extraordinarily difficult. Crann Bethadh reminded them that their true humanity was grounded in this world.

Growing down into life is difficult. Forming roots is messy work. Risky. It can literally mess with you. But it must be done before we can become who we were meant to be. Growing down is about learning patience, endurance, courage, humility—all of which are prerequisites for what we call human dignity. Human dignity (from the Latin dignitas, worthiness) is about learning your own essential worth as a human being—and that of everyone else’s. We find our dignity in the midst of life’s struggles, not by avoiding them. And there is always the risk that we can lose sight of it in this effort. We can become so injured and so disillusioned by what this world can do to us that we no longer believe our life is worth living. That is what happens to the young captain in Dances With Wolves. He comes very close to losing his humanity. He rediscovers it again by growing down into a life he knows nothing about.

In essence, that is the hopeful message I want you to hear in this book. If we take the risk of growing down, we may just find, indeed, I believe that we will ultimately find, that there are forces in the universe, both above us and beneath us, that mean us well. The older I get the more convinced I become that beneath the very heart of things, where everything comes from, there is a grace that means to make wonders of us in the end. We resist such a power only at the risk of not becoming who we really are.

The Spirit of the Seanchai

My method of inviting you to explore this process of growing down is by telling stories. I came by it honestly. According to my dad, my paternal ancestors were Irish. My great grandfather, Alexander Robinson, emigrated from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland. My dad used to joke that our ancestors were all horse thieves. We were the ones who got away, he would say with a twinkle in his eye. At least, I think he was joking.

More likely, great-grandfather, Alexander, came to Canada in that wave of Irish immigrants during the great potato famine that began in 1845. It was the worst disaster in Irish history. Over the four successive years when blight ruined the Irish crops, one million Irish died of starvation. Although Ireland was under British rule at the time, the monarchy, the English parliament, rich landlords and the church did little or nothing to assist the Irish. They simply let them die.

Growing down for my great-grandfather, Alexander, meant facing down the horror of poverty, hopelessness and death. Unless I miss my guess, it also probably meant letting his defiance of the British give him the courage to strike out across the Atlantic for a new land with no money in his pockets. That new land became Listowel, Ontario, Canada where my great-grandfather built a house with the stones from the land and started a farm. That is my heritage of growing down.

But there is another aspect of my heritage that informs this book. I don’t know for certain, but I suspect that there was a seanchai (pronounced shen-ah-kee) somewhere in my Irish ancestry. The shanachie were Ireland’s ancient storytellers and historians. Some of them served the ancient clan chiefs as lawmakers. Others were itinerants who would wander throughout the land, staying in people’s homes as honored guests. The shanachie told stories around a fire where the whole community would gather. They were the keepers of Ireland’s oral history, the bards who passed down the legends, poetry, jokes and wisdom of their people. They were revered in Ireland and still are. There is something about the spirit of these ancient storytellers that is in my blood.

The stories in this book are told in the spirit and tradition of the seanchai. They are stories about me and my family, both the family I was born into and the family who became mine through shared suffering and love. They are stories about the people who have loved me and whom I have loved. Some of the stories are deeply personal. Like my great-grandfather, they are also about the people who turned their back on me and left me for dead. Some are stories others have passed on to me, some from history, classic literature and films, like the one that begins this chapter.

Some are stories about parishioners and clients of mine who gave me the rare honor of allowing me to care for them, first as a pastor and later as a registered psychotherapist. Their real names are not used in this book and their circumstances changed so as not to reveal their identity. But their stories are true. In every case, they are stories that had my name on them when I first encountered them or lived them in the sense that they reflected (and still do) who I am and what I believe it means to live a truly human life in this world.

Hearing a story that has the hypnotic power of drawing us inward, inviting us to embark upon an inner journey of our own, is one of the ways we can engage the experience of growing down. That inner trip is the one that matters the most. When the magic a story works begins to take, we begin to see ourselves in the story’s characters, whose struggles, defeats and victories remind us of our own in the adventure that unfolds before us. Listening to and entering into ‘their’ stories becomes a therapeutic way in which we can enter or re-enter our own mystery. Once that inner journey is engaged the outer process of transformation is not far behind. This is the process of growing down.

I am indebted more than I know, of course, to those who have passed these stories on to me, to the people who wrote them or told them to me and to the people in my own life who occasioned some of them. Perhaps, putting them together in a book such as this is the best way I can express my gratitude.

Author’s Note on the Origins of This Book

In 2019, I self-published a book entitled, Growing Down: Stories Exploring Human Dignity. Just as I was about to begin sharing this work with a wider audience, the world was overwhelmed with the COVID-19 pandemic which, to this date, has infected more than five hundred million people and taken more than six million lives. For over three years, most of us have been afraid to go anywhere and to do many of the daily things we take for granted just about everywhere on the planet. Suddenly, hosting or attending a book signing or reading, which had been planned, were no longer on anyone’s agenda. It has been a crisis that has forced all of us to put things in a completely different perspective.

Coincidentally and fortuitously, one of my most ardent readers and dearest friends, Dr. Tim Gilmor, encouraged me to consider a second edition of Growing Down. Initially, I thought it would give me the opportunity to do a retrospective on the work, refocus the material, and clean things up. The more I began writing, the more I welcomed the opportunity to do a better job on what I had tried to say the first time around. The end result was a very different kind of book.

Thanks to both Tim and another dear friend, the Reverend Terry Samuel, I was provided with excellent editorial suggestions and, more importantly, thoughtful and encouraging reviews of my work. Both Tim and Terry know me well and sensed what I wanted to say. My wife Susan saw my drafts first, of course, because she remains the one person whose opinion and perspective I value above all. She had the more difficult task. It is one thing to read a story about someone you know and love. It is another to listen to an instant replay of your own shared life with that person—especially one that brings back traumatic memories of your own. As always she wore her heart on her sleeve and offered her completely honest perspective. Nothing could be more valuable to me.

As a result, while the basic theme of the old Growing Down remained unchanged, the new book became something quite different. I revised and expanded all of the chapters, removing some stories and adding new ones with new reflections. My purpose was to flesh out and deepen the original message about what it means to grow down into a deeper humanity. In the end, it felt like giving birth again. A new title was chosen: A Seagull Named Papa, which is also the title of one of the chapters, a chapter which, in its own way, captures the essence of the book.

This new book is a book for storytellers and people who love to hear stories. Not just any stories, but ones that have heart and that have the power to move hearts. Stories about ordinary people struggling to find a way to get in touch with those qualities within us all that allow us to become more human—even when, maybe even especially when, that way is painful. You will be the judge of that.

At the end of this volume, I have attempted to point to the source of some of these stories in the hope that readers will discover some of the treasure chests in which I have so gratefully scrounged. It is my way of paying tribute to these authors and creators. My first hope is that you will read some of these works for yourself or watch a film that was suggested or remember a time in your own life when you had a similar life experience.

But my deepest hope and prayer is that, if such stories have your name on them as well, if you find coming alive within you a gladness and strength deeper than you knew before hearing them, you will do what others have done for me: pass them on so that others may hear and pass them on too. Who knows where such a telling of tales may someday lead?

– B.R.

---

²  From the film, Dances With Wolves, Michael Blake, 1990.↩︎

³  James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, Random House, New York, 1996, p. 42.↩︎

Chapter 1

God’s Milk

…people with all the answers

Ain’t so easy to live with.⁴

It is said by those who should know—that, during his many travels in the desert, Moses came across a simple shepherd. They spent the day together, sharing the task of milking the shepherd’s ewes, gathering sticks for the night fire and preparing the evening meal.

Then, when the time came for them to retire for the night, the shepherd took some of the milk they had taken from his finest ewe, put it in a wooden bowl and walked out into the desert some distance until he came to a big flat rock. The shepherd placed the bowl of milk on top of the rock, prayed silently for a moment and then returned to the campsite to prepare for sleep.

But when he came back, Moses, who had been watching everything that had taken place, asked the shepherd, What are you doing?

The shepherd said, That’s God’s milk. Every night I take some of my best milk and leave it for him as my offering of thanks.

Now Moses, as we all know, had a rather sophisticated relationship with God and knew some things simple shepherds did not. At first, he tried to be gentle with the shepherd, And does God drink it? he asked the shepherd.

Of course! said the shepherd.

He does, said Moses, shaking his head. He felt sorry for the shepherd who was obviously a good man, but very naive about the Lord of the Universe. Finally, Moses, following the very best paternalistic tradition, felt compelled to put the shepherd straight.

Look, said Moses, I hate to have to be the one to have to tell you this but God is Spirit. He doesn’t drink milk.

At first, the shepherd was annoyed and the two of them got into a short argument about the matter. He was sure that God drank milk. After all, every night he went through the same ritual and every morning when he went to gather his bowl it was empty. He explained all this to Moses as respectfully as he could.

But Moses said, Look, God doesn’t drink milk. Somebody else must be drinking your milk. Why don’t you stay awake tonight and hide in those bushes over there where you can see who it is.

Alright, I’ll do it, said the shepherd, who was now beginning to feel quite anxious about what Moses was suggesting. He would find out for himself if God was the one who came to drink his milk.

So, while Moses went to bed, the shepherd hid himself in the bushes just far enough from the big flat rock so that he could see clearly from where he was and so that no one could see him. Night drew on and, in the light cast by the moon above, the shepherd saw a little fox come trotting in from the desert. When he got close to the rock, he stopped and looked right, then left. When he saw that the coast was clear, he went straight up toward that rock, hopped up on top and lapped up all the milk that the shepherd had left. When he was finished, he quietly disappeared into the desert again.

The next morning, Moses found the shepherd very depressed and downcast.

What’s the matter? asked Moses.

You were right, said the shepherd. God must be Spirit, and he told Moses everything that had happened. Then he added, God doesn’t want my milk.

Moses was surprised. I thought you would be happy, he said, for now you know more about God than you did before.

Yes, said the shepherd, I guess I do. But, now, the only thing I could do to express my love for God has been taken away. Now what will I give him? And he was very distraught. That night Moses stayed with the shepherd again; and for the first time in a very long time, the shepherd did not take any of his milk out into the desert for God.

But during the night, God came to Moses in a dream and asked, What did you do to that poor shepherd?

And Moses said, I just wanted him to know you better, Lord. I wanted him to know that you are Spirit and that you don’t drink milk.

But God said, Moses, you shouldn’t have done that. While it is true that I am Spirit, I always accepted with gladness the kind gift that shepherd left for me as the expression of his love. I do not need the milk; but I have a little friend who is very fond of milk. Now, where is he going to get it?⁵

The Demon of Righteousness

I had a friend get religion now he smiles so well

He even smiles when he says

I’m going to burn in his hell.⁶

What is it about us that needs to be right? I’m not talking about your everyday garden variety rightness—about, let’s say, when is the best time to change the oil in your vehicle or plant your tomatoes. I’m talking about the need to be right about our opinion of the way things are and the way things should be. I’m talking about our need to be really right, unassailably right, self-evidently right, transcendentally right, so right that our rightness, whether it be moral, political or religious, puts us in touch with the fundamental forces of the universe. That right. When it comes to being that right, well, then that means there is not the slightest possibility of doubt that we are right. And if we are that right, then, of course, it follows that those who do not see things the way we do and do not do things the way we think they should do them are either incredibly ignorant or, even worse, evil.

In the fall of 2020, almost 74 million Americans voted for an incumbent presidential candidate who, throughout his four years in public office, regularly used his office to castigate anyone who disagreed with him whether they be of the Democratic or Republican persuasion, and to accuse them of being (take your pick) misguided, insane, weak-minded, unhinged, corrupt and pure evil. I’m talking about the kind of rightness that drives people to hate and that can tear a society apart. It would seem that many of us have great difficulty in not falling prey to the madness of the demon of righteousness.

I know how we get that way. I remember being humiliated by a high school teacher who once asked me what I thought about the women’s suffragette movement in England that we happened to be studying at the time. He made me stand up in class and give my opinion, which I did, stating that I thought women at the time had every reason to protest their lack of human rights in a society dominated by men.

So, you think, Robinson, that the world is better off with liberated women? he asked.

Yes, sir. I guess I do.

Then, while leaving me standing in front of the class, this teacher proceeded to mock my liberal attitude and to explain to me and everyone else why women’s liberation was a curse upon society. I can still feel the sense of humiliation he made me feel for not sharing his view of reality.

It wasn’t long before I came under the thrall of this demon myself. I had become one of my church’s candidates for ordered ministry and went to seminary to take up my studies. While there was much about those years that I still cherish, including the opportunity of meeting some of the finest human beings I have ever known, the dark side of that experience were the times when we were encouraged to be dogmatic about our particular theological point of view. So dogmatic at times that it was common practice among both students and professors alike to look down upon and denigrate those who did not share their own particular theological point of view.

In such a highly charged atmosphere, I learned to become dogmatic myself because I thought I needed to defend myself rather than simply admit that I didn’t know everything and that I could, indeed, be mistaken. I simply lacked the emotional maturity to do so; and even if I had been capable of demonstrating such humility, I am quite sure that it would have been regarded as intellectual and academic weakness. So, I learned to look down upon and to denigrate others because of their point of view. Now, the memory of those times is a source of shame for me.

Carl

An oft-quoted story about Pablo Picasso is about the time he was

hanging around an exhibition of his paintings in Paris. He was approached by a man who asked Picasso why he didn’t paint people the way they look.

Well, how do they look? asked Picasso.

The man took a photograph of his wife from his wallet and handed it to him.

Picasso looked at the picture, then handed it back and said, She is awfully small. And flat too.

How do you know that what you think you see is real or just your perception of reality?

Carl showed up out of the blue one Sunday morning in the small rural congregation where I was the minister. Because it was so small and stable, anybody new stood out like a sore thumb, Carl—even more so because he was youngish, in his early thirties, good-looking—and he could sing. Oh my, could he sing!

Well, it was not long before all the unmarried young women in the choir were aflutter and counting the days when they could invite him home to dinner. Before long, there he was right in the middle of the choir, too, basking in all that heavenly light of female pulchritude. Carl was the most exciting thing that had happened to that congregation in a long time. Plus, he was an all-around nice guy to boot. Pleasant, easy to talk to, polite, respectful. I enjoyed getting to know him and welcoming him into the congregation. It lasted for about a month.

Then, without warning, Carl just disappeared. Didn’t show up for choir practice or church. Nobody had seen hide nor hair of him. After a few weeks, I became worried and began to make inquiries. I knew that