Both persons of faith as well as agnostics will struggle in incomprehension to digest the Kevin Smith story. Unfortunately, the lessons we all need to learn demand greater insight into human behavior and potential and into the nature of reality than our limited vocabulary at present allows.
Dismissing in disgust, whether as charlatan or Satanist, the demagoguery displayed by Smith and his apparently impenetrable influence over his followership doesn’t allow us to recognize our own face in the mirror of the characters we in horror repudiate – the megalomaniac leader, the gullible, unthinking followers. Nowhere do we see ourselves in the dissociated condemned. We cannot put ourselves into the narrative and so we can learn nothing new about ourselves. And that is unfortunate, for that sordid scene of human sacrifice is an accurate, albeit exaggerated depiction of commonplace scenes of Jamaican social cacophony. Di mira a trai se sopm! (The mirror is talking).
The genius of Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of God was his weaving a constant stream of narrative whereby people could see themselves in his stories and evaluate their motive and behavior. “The kingdom of heaven is like…”
But nothing is learned if one cant find oneself in the story. Similarly, we stand to learn next to nothing about the hells we occupy should we not be able to decode the actions and drives of those we demonize but can’t recognize (within ourselves).
The unfortunate legacy of a religious system that fosters near total dependence on appointed clergy not just for interpretation of religious text, but more so, on the way to live as elucidated by those texts (and/or any other authoritative frame of reference), is one we have inherited and still grapple with.
In the flamboyant high church garb “His Majesty” opted to wear, one discerns a regression into the history of the Catholic church which in every respect likewise displayed a similar greedy simony, a similar toxic concoction of practical generosity and prolific abuse, similar rabid corruption, sexual perversion, grandiosity, and rapacious exploitation of the poor in the face of hoarded wealth and centralized power. The difference is only that of scale.
Equally unfortunately, those of us uncommitted to the once progressive Philosophical Materialism of the Enlightenment, that at least allowed Europe subsequently to cast off the shackles of the magnified religious tyranny of an ecclesiastic establishment manned by 10,000 Kevin Smiths… (or should you prefer, one ‘holy’ Infallible Kevin Smith with the organizational capacity of 10,000), are for the most part trapped in a moral dualism that all too often does not permit us to see the bridge between darkness and light, goodness and evil. The arduous task of mining the grey (if not for good, at least for glimmers of understanding) we happily leave to the anomalous psychologist, much preferring to cast the devil to the dungeon (if we can catch him) and throw away the key.
So no one is likely to reflect on the wasted human potential of both predator and prey. No one is likely to consider the human tragedy that occurred before the ‘ark’ madness began (possibly precipitated by Covid) – a religious leader with formidable skills, untethered to the mediation of the authentic ‘covering’ the apostle Peter benefitted from, as represented in Jesus and Paul – the first to forgive his mistakes, the second to confront him in them; without which, Peter himself might have ended up in a similar ‘boat’ as did Kevin, corrupting the spirit and exploiting/destroying the bodies of those fish he was called to catch, as so perfectly demonstrated by those who later would claim Peter’s legacy and seat in the Roman church’s Petrine throne. Surely, the divine purpose was the absorption of those fish into Christ’s mystical body – i.e. the body of values represented in the narrative of Jesus’ earthly teachings about the heavenly realm.
Kevin indeed was a gifted leader, as attested to both by those well-served by his gifts, as well as those who were glad enough to associate with him when his star was still rising (before his descent into the abyss of depraved insanity), but insufficiently motivated to intervene when he began to fall from heaven/lose his way.
Would to God the society’s penchant to condemn and dissociate itself from the inconvenient bogeyman / battyman, could also assist it in eschewing evil and choosing good, but alas, our shadows come from deep untreated sores within, not just from ‘bad’ association.
Regardless of the church, the message, or the leadership, our collective spiritual light is unlikely to increase if our vision of the world only allows us to ask “Where did he/they go wrong?” rather than “Where did we go wrong?” How could a fatherless child so quickly and completely convince Jamaican community that God looked like him? Like Hitler’s Germany, ‘smadi no prep dem’? Wasn’t the spiritual soil first tilled?
Those who consider themselves well rather than sick can afford to deride both cult following and cult pastor for years to come, believing themselves above the dysfunction displayed. Hopefully, for the sake of our continued dance with religion (or too with what some so ignorantly consider its replacement), we can find some satisfying answers both to discourage those unseasoned Kevin Smiths that remain from ‘launching out too deep’ sans nearby life-coach, (for those intimately familiar with Pentecostal church history, a fairly routine occurrence) but even more importantly, to appropriately cultivate and encourage those Kevins willing to take the yoke for the harnessing and much needed direction of their considerable potential for the sake of a still much too needy society.
Unfortunately also, due to a limited conception of the ‘supernatural’, both materialists (for whom a fitting alternative definition is the ‘superstitious’) and moral dualists, (philosophically constrained to designate every purported ‘supernatural’ act a work of either the god or satan of their theology … never a reference to human potential and capacity), are unlikely to make much more sense of the seemingly bizarre testimonies of the eyewitnesses to the debacle than wistful, un-insightful summations of caricatured charlatan/demoniac cult leader and spellbound/hypnotized cult followers, neither of which seems remotely relatable and thus the opportunity for introspection and the expansion of consciousness that might thereby result is likely to be missed.
Pity! We are a maverick people, capable of much more than imitation of empire …but alas, who will train our goatherds?
YeKengalé 