BETHANY SPICE

November 3, 2024General Theology

We don’t know how it’s all going to end. We can’t even get a straight picture of how it all began, of how we actually got here. What we do know is the world is at a hugely precarious moment in its history, and there seems to be no intelligent voice speaking for a good and wholesome, human way forward.

At a point like this the gospel stands out more brilliantly than ever. “You are the salt of the earth. You are a city on a hill. Let your light shine!”

The salt and light for our present day is the declaration of God’s unconditional nonviolence. It might seem irrelevant, a random snippet of theology for those who think about these things, but really it’s immense. At the end of the gospel Jesus tells the disciples to “go therefore and teach all nations.” The teaching of divine nonviolence seems to have got lost somewhere along the way—the bit about “love your enemy,” and then you will be just like your Father in heaven. In the first three hundred years of Christianity there was no possible question of any other way. The teaching of nonviolence sustained itself against the Roman Empire simply with prayer, faith and forgiveness.

For some time I have written blogs here trying to explain the teaching in perhaps something of an abstract or intellectual way. But the Bethany Center in Syracuse has become over the years a real focus of life and meaning for a small network of local people and several others online. The teaching is real and life-changing in the hearts of this connected group. It is important to look to the community focus at least as much as to abstract reflection.

Others might say that a small group like this has little or no impact in comparison to the planetary-scale forces at work. But what is striking is how Jesus used the images of very little things having a disproportionate transforming effect on a much larger scale—things like seeds, yeast, salt. The same thing can be said of herbs and spices and their ability to change the flavor and taste of a whole dish. A small community is like a spice changing the color and texture of everything around it.

THE DEEP BETWEEN: A GROWING HUMAN SPACE WHERE VIOLENCE IS TRANSFORMED INTO NONVIOLENCE.

November 4, 2023General Theology

Is there a way of talking about our human world today that does not descend rapidly into apocalyptic nightmare, or, alternatively, escape into a religious realm with the promise of a heavenly otherworld to be enjoyed after all this is over?

This question struck me forcibly at a recent conference in Paris that came together on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of René Girard. Girard is famous for discovering human mimesis, the insight that people copy each other preconsciously, and especially in the area of desire. When we understand this, we easily see how wars arise and escalate, and at the conference this was underlined. Just like rival individuals, each political power imitates the other in their desire, their demands, and the fury of their military response. Add the fact that each warring party has nukes and we’re on the very brink of apocalypse. Or, what is called “apocalypse.”

The problem is that the biblical book that gives us this term (the last book of the bible) actually means by it “revelation,” a drawing back of the veil. And part of the revelation (the apocalypse)—along with the violence—is the nonviolent Lamb, a figure which presides over the whole book and in the end gains final wonderful victory on earth.

How does this happen? Is it purely supernatural? Some form of scriptural magic? (In which case, open to serious doubt as a fanciful fairy story.) Or, is there some kind of real and rooted human process than can and will bring this end about?

When people come together at a conference like the one in Paris there are a lot of thoughts and ideas whirling around, and things can often be seen in startling new ways. One of Girard’s original concepts was what he called the “interdividual,” meaning that human beings are not solitary psyches, but actually an open-ended system of interaction and agency with others. A psychologist working with these ideas came up with the happy expression “the self between.” The self is not a godlike pure consciousness, but a mutual product together with others with whom they are in relation. Humanity is always a dense interwoven system of possible and actual connections with others. This “self between” was mentioned at the conference, and it implies that any of us, any “self,” will always and necessarily be in constant interchange with others to achieve our very identity and being in the world.

Another of the concepts at the conference came from Benoit Chantre, the most important of Girard’s collaborators in the final period of his career. Chantre suggested to Girard the idea of “intimate mediation,” something which Girard accepted. This needs a bit of explanation. An original distinction made by Girard was between what he called “external” and “internal” mediation. Essentially this means we all choose models in our lives. A model that truly has our admiration, respect, and honor exercises “external mediation.” Such a model shows us elements of conduct and behavior that we seek to copy, but we never enter into competition with that model. “Internal mediation,” on the other hand, refers to a model which becomes our rival, one whose actual way of being in the world we want to possess and have for ourselves. Bob Dylan perhaps said it best: “You’re gonna have to serve somebody . . . it may be the devil, it may be the Lord . . .” In Girardian terms “the Lord” would be somebody you truly honor, while “the devil” is the rival who makes your life hell.

What Chantre added is really dramatic. He points to a third way, a mediation that goes in another direction altogether, not to something outside and above ourselves which keeps order, nor to something inside ourselves which torments us and creates disorder. Rather, there is something that enters into our selves, in the very same “between” space that the rival enters, but with an entirely different dynamic and outcome. Chantre does not explain this in great detail, but he does say explicitly and precisely that the “intimate mediator” is not our rival.

How does this work? The thought that I added at the conference was that intimate mediation was necessarily nonviolent. It cannot enter into our “selves” in the same place as “internal mediation” and not create rivalry unless it is essentially nonviolent. This would then be close to Dylan’s poetic and biblical thought of “the Lord.” In a world of interior mediation (inside the self) every other model can provoke rivalry. Only the supremely nonviolent, nonresisting Lamb can exercise mediation in the self and not provoke us to retaliate.

But this should not at all be understood in a dogmatic religious sense. It is saying something quite different from “everyone should be a Christian.” First, if interdividual psychology is correct then it means that there is always this “space between” human beings. It is a space that has been steadily growing in power in the romantic ages, until now when just about everyone on the planet is involved in some kind of internal relationship. But, at the same time, the figure of the nonresisting Christ has inspired countless imitators, from Stephen of the New Testament, through to Gandhi, Bonhoeffer, MLK Jr, Romero, Mandela, Edith Stein, Rajani Thiranagama etc. These are heroic, boundary figures, but what they represent is a progression of the “space between” to a progressively new depth and human agency. Here people are prepared to give everything without retaliatory violence, in order to bring life for others. All of them relate to this space for personal reasons, with different kinds of stories and probably different levels of clarity. But what is consistent is the opening up of this space, such that it deserves its own name. Because it represents a depth of giving, a surrender to a sea without bottom where the very water is giving for the sake of others, it might be called “the deep between.”

My argument is that this is a real space, one that stands as radical alternative to mimetic rivalry, violence, and war. Many people don’t recognize it, possibly thinking it a kind of idiocy, or, at best, a religious dream. But the whole Girardian scientific logic, through psychologists like Oughourlian, and astute companions and commentators like Chantres, leads necessarily to this. It is in fact a matter of a general human structure, hidden to the light that looks only at rivalry and violence, but just as real as those things, and even more so. It lacks guns, tanks, bombs, planes, generals, and tyrants. But, nevertheless, it leaves an actual and powerful trace in that world. MLK Jr leaves a trace. Edith Stein leaves a trace. And the trace creates further traces, which are signs and structures that enable peace to flourish. Peace and disarmament treaties, commissions on truth and reconciliation, peace activists, artists and artisans, campaigners for the environment and for the ethical treatment of animals, all these things are traces of the deep between. It is vital to bring this human space to prominence, because unless this space is effective and spoken about, the discourse of war and escalation appears inevitable. (Girard’s own word is “implacable.”) On the contrary, there is no apocalyptic doom, because there is an actual alternative human space of nonviolence and peace which is practically effective in human affairs. It seems vital to continue to raise this space to public discourse in order that it might challenge the fatalism of the so-called apocalypse.

A particularly telling example of ”the deep between” I might suggest is the teaching and conduct of a Turkish Islamic leader by the name of Fetullah Gulen. In the nineteen seventies this person founded a movement called “Hizmet” (service) which now comprises several million followers. They work across the world in hospitals, schools, aid projects, media outlets, but they have been subjected to severe persecution in their native Turkey, falsely labelled “terrorists” by a dictatorial regime needing a convenient scapegoat. Gulen is himself in exile in the U.S., constantly under threat from political forces both in Turkey and the U.S. But he consistently teaches nonviolence to his followers. His words that I give below serve to demonstrate that the human space I am talking about does not belong to the religion of Christianity but is arising organically in the world as a transformed way of being human on the planet. Certain spiritual leaders may see it more clearly because they are sensitive to the transformative impact of revelation. But, once again, that does not remove it from the human. On the contrary, this revelation is radically about being human. The following words belong to a discourse that rises up in our time as a tide of human meaning alternative to the violent clichés of “apocalypse.”

Prepare yourself to forgive these people who committed genocide against you. When they come back with a sorry heart, let them find you with an open arm. Do not become a tyrant yourself by responding in kind. You are fighters of love.

THE TRANSFORMATIVE ICON OF SHEEP

October 23, 2022Anthropo-theologyIcon, Nonviolence

The church rises up, a sudden eruption of art and meaning on a sun-beaten coastal plain. The place used to be abutting a strategic harbor next to the sea until the shoreline moved away. Now its sudden presence in the middle of nowhere reinforces the feeling of a wonderful alien interruption of standard human affairs. Like a beautiful mother-ship set down to invite travelers to journey to another world.

In literal terms the building should be understood as the Christian re-imagining of the standard imperial urban “basilica,” the roofed public space for the conduct of Roman business and law. Because Christian gatherings were not the private sacral space of the temple, reserved for the god and the priests, but rather a communal assembly and event, these big buildings made an ideal template. As the Christian movement emerged from persecution and hiding it imitated the secular buildings where citizens came together freely for ordinary human affairs. First lesson, therefore: a “basilica” is essentially a secular space, something  ordinary, human, communal, down-to-earth.

Second thing: some context. This church, along with others in the neighboring Adriatic city of Ravenna, reflect the political and military success of Justinian I, the Byzantine Roman Emperor lately taking power back from barbarian conquerors of Italy. Justinian saw it as his job to ensure the conformity of everyone in his empire to orthodox Christian faith, meaning, essentially, the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, fully divine, fully human. This is a far cry from Christian faith as a persecuted and despised minority religion, which was the case just a little over two centuries prior. But imperial politics are not entirely the point here.

What is the point is the wonder of a vision which saw human existence fully caught up in divine existence. While the emperor and his violence knew themselves supported and endorsed by Christian institutional religion, the core vision of this splendid church by the sea is of a humanity completely transformed by communication of nonviolent divinity. In the glorious crowning image of the apse there is no other-worldly procession of saints and martyrs, nor any hint of the emperor or his court, only a panorama of sheep in a land of peace! Whoever conceived this majestic mosaic figured humanity’s identification with the divine not in terms of a disembodied spiritual other-world but an earth turned entirely to its own deepest possibilities of love, nonviolence and life. The doctrine of the two natures and one person was for this visionary artist a human world set free from harm. The divine conjoined to the human meant the communication of divine nonviolence to every relational being, and therewith the creation of the truly human and divine person.

So, a third thing: the beauty of sheep! What are these animals raised to the roof of an imperial building where before it was likely Winged Victory with horses and a war chariot looking down? These are the defenseless, the meek, the disarmed, the humble, the creatures at the wrong end of humanity’s systems of force and blood-letting. But now somehow they are in a land made just for them, a land of tranquility and plenty, with not a sword in sight! It is alternative human space. It is the public building, the basilica, made for the conduct of human affairs by active means other than violence.

San Apollinare Apse

As you enter the main building the wide welcoming sweep of a foot-worn marble floor underscores there are no seats or pews where people sit to become passive recipients of doctrine. There is only a standing space of human interaction and proximity. The gleam of the floor naturally invites you in, and then lifts up the head to where the light pours through the windows above. There is a great deal of light. The pillars of flowing marble also lead upward and onward, toward the luminous final vision of the triumphal apse. And there the wonder reveals itself. It is here that this public space declares its most profound and generative meaning. It is not simply a concourse of citizens, but a gathering of the human species, onetime victims of their own chronic violence, now transformed into something dramatically and miraculously new. The glowing color of the apse is green, the kind of green of a field or wood at the turn from spring to summer, fresh, warm, touchable, edible, endless. And the dominant figure or symbol within the intense wash of green is the sheep.

Sheep are everywhere, two sets of twelve, and three in the middle. Below they surround the (first or second century) martyr-bishop Apollinaris in the figure of the Good Shepherd, above they stream from images of the New Jerusalem set in the corners of the vertical wall. The iconography bends the world inside out, with the standard victim of human slaughter become now the symbol of humanity set free from violence, in a space of sensate peace and pleasure. How is this perceptual-spatial miracle possible? It can only be by means of a twisting around of normally imagined space, where the victim is systematically not figured, where human business is conducted as usual. Or, if the victim is figured, it is in the shadow of triumphant violence. Here instead the archetypal object of killing, the sheep, becomes the triumphant master image, radiating its inherent nonretaliation as the orchestrating theme of space itself. It is a miracle of art and figuration, but it is born not from artistic imagination as such but from something that has occurred in the public space of citizens below. Thus, the basilica becomes not a place of the king and his many weapons, but of the king’s many vanquished citizens—and possibly the king too—now willingly embracing the loss of weaponry. The icon of the sheep as the brilliant central motif of this space turns the basilica upside down, making it light as air, floating with its inhabitants, like astronauts, in a new order of gravity. The Roman public building has gone from law court, institution of human violence, to an outer/inner space of grace, the transformed dimensions of nonviolent human being. Centuries of Christianity as business-as-usual has masked this transformation catastrophically, but now little by little its deep revolution in human space is being recognized for what it is, in and through spontaneous eruptions like this basilica on the shores of the Adriatic. 

GUNS, GODS, AND NEW HUMANITY

May 30, 2022Anthropo-theologyGuns, Jesus, Sacrifice

How can you write humanly about something inhuman: the massacre of nineteen elementary school children, plus two teachers, by a random gunman armed with weapons of war? Don’t we need another way of talking, another idiom, one that is actually inhuman, to describe it? Nothing else can do.

The events in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX, belong to a background of school shootings stretching back over twenty years. Names like Columbine, Sandy Hook, Stoneman Douglas, are signature items in a roll call of social doom able to strike anywhere, anytime, without anyone able to do anything to stop it. The present resulting age of constant extreme social anxiety is the definition of the loss of functional humanity.

Some commentators reach back to themes of child sacrifice to explain things, and this, I think, is a language close to what might fit. But it is still not inhuman enough. After all, sacrifice, even child sacrifice, is something human beings have frequently done, as the Bible attests. What makes it intelligibly human is that it is intended to resolve a communal problem of stress, fear and anxiety, by channeling the group crisis onto a designated victim, and so allowing everyone else to find some level of overall meaning, order and well-being in their lives. But school shootings (and mass shootings generally) have no feasible outcome of communal success and well-being. Rather they serve only to increase anxiety, fear, anger, desperation, and further breakdown. If anything, they are actually anti-sacrificial: fraying the bonds of social cohesion and meaning, leading only to further eruptions of crisis and violence. School shootings are the mark of breakdown in the construct of human community itself.

The theoretical anthropologist, René Girard, had a term for this. It is a vital concept to help us understand the present situation. The term is “sacrificial crisis.” This means a situation where the effects of sacrificial order—the basis for Girard of human culture—are so eroded that violence can break out massively and anywhere in a constant attempt to re-found the world. He is talking about the cyclical nature of human violence at the root of culture, and situations where its built-in instability has overtaken its temporary stability. It is de facto a situation of terrible anxiety where human society begins desperately to look for a new scapegoat or victim, so that it can feel better about itself and go along with its business as before. But the single shooter does not seek this sacrificial solution, and the gun lobby behind him, that protects his ability to acquire the instrument of random killing, is likewise not interested in this outcome. They are not thinking humanly, in the way that all other cultures seem to have thought. Something else is going on.

What Girard did not specifically identify is what should be called the institutionalization of sacrificial crisis. Rather than resolve its tensions in a new sacred order, this condition finds its meaning and purpose in a permanent state of open violence, with each separate horror part of a rolling crisis which is its own overall justification. The option depends on a quite particular set of circumstances, including large landmass and material resources not threatened by local breakdown, a society of intense rivalry and competition, a background history of armed violence against minority groups, a founding legal document seeming to enshrine the right to carry guns unconditionally, and available weaponry of extreme power capable of killing many people in a very short space of time.

Sound familiar?

These circumstances create their own spiritual condition which must be understood in and for itself, and that indeed has to be the point. Human beings have never quite known anything like this before, and so the situation has to be considered effectively inhuman; or so novel for humans that they lack any intelligible language to talk about it. The permanent state of open violence becomes its own way of being in the world, brought about by the particular circumstances described, but taking on an independent godlike status. In the past the godlike associations of violence would have been rolled quickly back into a given religious/sacrificial system, but today they carry a free-floating identity as self-vindicating open violence. They are a god without a face.

Unless the anonymous face is perhaps the gun itself.

The gun kills, the gun continues to kill, the gun is immune from blame, the gun must therefore be a god. For many this is a noxious, inhuman god, one that is not tolerable for any society. But for many others this is a god that indeed may not be questioned. Those who feel this latter way are in the unique situation of espousing a religious emotion in relation to something that functions in an inverse way to religion.

It carries out sacrificial violence, but it gathers no community; it kills its victims but creates no peace; it exercises its priesthood, but considers nothing sacred; it enacts its logic, but produces no meaning. This is inhuman, but it is real.

Because this is a spiritual condition it is not sufficient to double down on attempts to blame, including the gun itself. Mobilizing the community to cast out the evil thing with anger and righteousness will only repeat the dynamics of violence and get more people armed. Blaming the gun ends with people carrying more guns. What is needed instead is an equal and alternative novelty of spirituality, one that responds to the inhumanity of the gun with, in fact, a new humanity. There has to be a revolutionary discovery of nonviolence and compassion, the willingness not to respond to violence with violence, the opening of new transcendent space of peace and forgiveness that deliberately and radically lets go of the gun.

How can this happen? I’m sure in fact that it’s already happening in many individual stories and lives, but what is necessary in addition is this become a theme, a motif, talked about more and more at the level of commentary, of politics, school, and church and college teaching. Politicians are opportunists by nature, and they respond instinctively to whatever’s in the wind. Even if a fresh spirituality of nonviolence is a minority persuasion, a strong and consistent theology of nonviolence arising in Christian communities will inevitably give energy and voice to common-sense policies of gun-harm reduction. In the end spirituality is what makes society, and the lack of consistent spirituality of nonviolence allows the gridlock of gun politics to persist and persist. We seem to be locked into the anger of the gun itself, with both sides of the debate, figuratively at least, pointing guns at each other. A breakthrough of new humanity in the face of the inhuman is instead the only possible fresh meaning in the impasse.

The very deficit of humanity becomes the possibility of transformed humanity. Are we not in the time itself when the nonviolent spirituality of Jesus arises as the most practical way forward?

WAR AND THE AGE

April 11, 2022General TheologyBonhoeffer, The Age, Theology, War

How do you write a poetry of war? And, by that I mean, the end of war?

The First World War produced the famous British “war poets,” including Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon. At school we learned their inconsolable lament for young manhood cut down in the gobbling carnage of trench war. The trenches pressed huge numbers of human beings together, both as comrades and enemies. The suffering of all those human beings could not be ignored, so there was inevitably a poetry, one essentially of the end of war

But now everything is digital, smart, hypersonic, nuclear, without any time to see or think. What can be seen is in fact only another digital product, the media which surrounds us 24/7 and takes on a life of its own. How can you trust what is presented to you? Even if it’s true and factual its enormous immediacy in our sitting rooms overwhelms our ability to meditate humanly, deeply and clearly. Not even Homer, I think, could have written about modern war—because modern media does not allow the human space for reflection and art. Instead it carries us along on the relentless tide of war itself, and indeed of total war.

Which brings us to the teaching of the gospel. The gospel is the only resource that can restore primacy to the human in the context of modern war. It creates its own, vital distance.  “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. These things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom . . . All these are but the beginning of birth pangs.” (Matt 24:6-8)

The gospel tells us not to trust to war, and its media, for the ultimate meanings of humanity. This is an absolutely essential teaching for our modern age with its terminal despairing perceptions. This is not to underestimate the destructive forces in the hands of human beings, and the possibility of their unleashing them, and indeed the fact of their already being unleashed. But what it does tell us is that the gospel places another transforming dimension in human affairs, one which is not going to be canceled out by war, but in fact grows step by step with the lethal threats of violent meaning.

This is the language of the gospel itself and not a logical, mechanical deduction from history or anthropology. It is a matter of what I might call aionology (pronounce aye-on-ology).

Oh, no, not another “ology” word for Christians to learn, I hear you say! But, yes, I’m afraid it’s so!

I consider aionology essential and urgent for our time. We are generally used to what theology calls “eschatology,” i.e. the end times brought by Christ at his appearing, as a definitive line drawn between this world and the next of “eternal life.” But in the New Testament Jesus has recourse to the concept of “the age” (aion), rather than eternity, something that is consistently misrepresented in the translations. “Aion” or “age” in its literal sense does not abolish time, as eternity does. It basically tells us that there is a radical break expected between the present age and the age to come, meaning that the cosmos is changed radically, but it is still the same essential time-filled sphere of human existence as before.

Sometimes in the New Testament it is almost impossible to avoid the correct translation. A good example is in Luke chapter sixteen and the parable of the dishonest manager. At verse eight the “master complimented the unrighteous manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the sons of this age (aion) are more shrewd in relation to their own kind than the sons of light” (New American Standard Bible). The passage then goes on to tell us to “make friends for yourselves from the Mammon of unrighteousness so that when it gives out they may welcome you into the tents of the Age (aion)” (David Bentley Hart). The clear implication is that there is the present age, and then there is another one, appropriate for a people of light, where they will be welcomed and live in something this-worldly as tents!

The same (“of the age” or plural “for ages”) meaning of aion can be read in the other places where it appears, and it tells us again and again that the continuity of time is not broken by an alien Platonic eternity. And there are other hints in the New Testament that Jesus foresaw a radical renewal of creation rather than a negation of the material realm (viz. Matt 19:28, and Acts 3:21). It does not mean that time will be experienced as it is now—with its subjugation to death, insecurity, violence, war. Rather, precisely, its experience will be liberated from these things, yet still in an enduring material, temporal reality!

This is the horizon of aionology. It was a horizon embraced by the German theologian, Bonhoeffer, but perhaps in an even more radical way. For Bonhoeffer the world had reached a point where it operated without “the working hypothesis” of God. It seems to get along fine on its own without God. But rather than double down on trying to convince people of God, the role of the Christian becomes the same as that of God—to suffer in the world, and with the world, as it struggles to be the world.

I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith… By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In doing so, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world — watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a human being and a Christian. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters from Prison.)

The purpose of this co-suffering is far from masochistic; it is creative and transformative. If God is in the depths of the world in this way, and Christians are with God, it means that the world is being called from its depths to the end of violence, the end of war, the end of hatred . . . to radical change of heart.

It is this that provides the meaning of war for Christians, the poetry of the end of war. Aionology is the meaning of God as a deep undertow, a reversal of everything, and something already going on. It is the melting of the ice caps in a spiritual sense, leaving an ecology where God strips the world of its violent meanings, where the present triumph of generative murder is completely overcome and undone. The material realm is already spiritual. It is itself spirituality presently unrecognized, but destined for final full revelation.

Even so a poetry of the end of war arises by virtue of the age, in which we live, the age given by the gospel.

RIVER CANTICLE

December 30, 2021Poetry

Old gypsy lady Susquehanna, three hundred million years and counting

Older than that holy Nile or Ganges, earth’s oldest water ever spilling

Daughter to the clouds and rainbows, sister to aged Allegheny mountains

Great artery of this America, fountain to a well of years so near to filling

Time must circle back on itself, though first it seems straight like gravity

In such wise the gypsy speaks deceitful tales when in youth she murmurs

Whispering to the rocks of what will come as fate to every camp and city

Rank histories of war upon its banks, floods of old, unrepented murders,

Knowing what all knowing is, but then at last that viscid surface quickens

Casting off its sullen glaze of lies, deep pendulum of ancient slaughter,

Her measure all at once plunges swifter to the sea, the dull motion lightens

A dead history of meandering turns and shifts to this rush of living water

At Columbia, the river town where the gypsy finds her soul and freedom

Where Wright built his cabin and plied his ferry, he was a gospel pacifist

The Quaker sought a different kind of world, an altogether novel idiom,

Grace not guns, his kind of tongue, a destiny of peace here made manifest

Unseen world’s discovery, the dove’s deep forgiving arc circling to descent

At last, by the side of a dazzled flood in this late age’s lingering afternoon

You feel the river urging, blocked and held but pressing on, never quenched

And yet all made new in a continent sore abused will never come too soon

The Susquehannock lived here and if Iroquois, beaver wars, and flintlocks

Did not finish them smallpox and Sunday Paxton boys surely killed them all

Meanwhile rafts laden with flour and coal flowed downstream to the docks

And lumber piled thick as grass on Front Street, a nation’s baptized capital

For the newly rich, but each the fractious prism of the other, this American

Dream, with other chattels too, African slaves and their traumatized exodus

North, crossing here to yet longer exile, a ghetto space amidst Samaritans

While railroads hammered out the rhythm, the sound of industry, iron angelus

Chorded into music by metal strung guitars, ragtime, jazz, blues, rap and rock

Soul memory of exiles, easing pain where it’s impossible to know the river-bed

Until at last water itself sounds alarm, altering tempo to reveal history’s shock

Against life itself, a Susquehanna effect, changing misery for light that’s shed

Everywhere her voice is raised to tell and any man or woman hears her meaning

This song, they feel it, swelling over every hill and scale, this altered frequency

Incense and lavender, heather and thyme, fields of gold and the last harvest season

O portal of the Jordan, where murder is no more, and all is but grain and mercy

Come, come all, to this unknown west, this undiscovered south, where the leaves

Heal each broken skin of every shade, on trees beside a river flowing from a throne

Abyss of love disappearing and resurfacing ever the same, so no creature grieves

For dead oceans of hatred without cease, there is just the swirl of love to atone

Throw wide the gates to the river city, this final Columbia of all our dreams and history

The water seethes with light, angels and martyrs dance forever among its fiery filaments

Shrapnel metamorphic to compassion, its bitter molecules recoded into tender mystery

Transformation is the face of truth, not two-faced being and a dumb parade of elements

Start in the middle always, nel mezzo del cammin, the thick of life’s most urgent story

Here, here with this, this flowing river, and all its quick, bright, swift, and sudden glory

Presence or Pathways

November 1, 2021General TheologyAnthropo-theology

We are always in the presence of God. The same gentle steady presence throughout our life. But if you are someone who has made changes in life, and perhaps against the grain, it may be that you think God was not there at certain difficult and painful periods, and certainly not in that gentle way.

There are churches, physical buildings, which proclaim the presence of God. The power of architecture and the beauty of art help underline the claim. Going back to Greek temples these often have spectacular natural settings, overlooking deep valleys, or perched on jutting cliffs, places which combine to create a sense of awe and the sacred. But is any of this the presence of the revealed God of forgiveness and nonviolence?

There was a time I used to visit one of “Christendom’s great churches” to pray. I considered it almost the headquarters of God on earth. And it is true, the prayer chapel had a feeling of strong spirituality. But there came a moment when I felt crushed by the whole place, and I walked out into the sunshine determined to look for God in other, much more unlikely places. Was God with me as I walked out the bronze doors?

This is a question of later years. At the time, I simply took the risk, and believed God was big enough to find me wherever my path might take me.

A concrete choice like this is very much for the sake of the mind, for the sake of mental transformation. It is in fact about what pathways are being followed in the brain, and the possibility of opening new ones so that God may be felt in new ways and in different human spaces. And this did eventually happen to me.

But the question remains because the buildings and temples remain, and they continue to claim emphatically that God is there and draw the pilgrims inside. And, because the issue of buildings is also always about mental pathways, it is just as possible that people will have a fixed abstract concept associated with the building and even though they never step inside.

A church, either an actual building or a sociological organization, is a projection in the world. Inevitably it mirrors the world back to itself. In a superficial separation-of-church-and-state society the church will, by that very concept, say “God is in his heaven, and basically the world is the way it is meant to be. Otherwise, we would not be given and receiving tax privileges and blessing big social occasions.” Other cultures have dealt with churches by making them at most a sentimental keepsake from other times, desirable again for big moments as a romantic backdrop.

But the real “church” as projection in the world is something we carry inside ourselves and in our relationships. People sometimes say I am opposed to churches. But that is not the case. The churches are vital carriers of the gospel tradition. The point is the new situation we are in, not opposition to what has been. The mental pathways of peace and nonviolence are not as such doctrinal distinctions or identifying creedal formulae. Neither are they principles of behavior to pledge us a happy afterlife. They are a living shift in human meaning. A change of our way of being on earth. I have steered away from “doing church,” not because I think church is impossible. On the contrary, all calling people together on the basis of love and forgiveness, that in fact is church. But because we have also seen churches as mechanisms for projecting humanity outside and beyond the earth, then it is necessary to have a period of serious abstinence from the traditional practice of church.

We need continually to develop the mental space and relationships of peace and divine nonviolence as a way of life, in order to get away from the otherworldism of normal Christianity.

This other practice is for the sake of building these new mental pathways, just as a sports coach will do intensive training at the beginning of a season, or before a final tournament. Transformed pathways and projections need concentration and intensity. This is why I prefer study, retreats, focused prayer, alternative ritual and settings etc., to regular “church.”

But what of the presence of God? If you are someone who has made spiritual lifestyle changes you may contrast a sense of God you had before, with what you feel now. God may have been threatening, or simply alien. How do you reconcile that with mental pathways which seem very different now? Was God always with you? Or, is God in fact reducible to purely a mental projection?

No. If God is nonviolent then God is infinitely patient and long-suffering. God does not impose God’s will, not at all. The appearance of God’s rage, losing patience and moving to wipe out his creatures, this is the product of a primitive level of perception where historical divine identity rooted in violence overwhelms revealed identity rooted in liberation. Why would God wish to liberate an oppressed people unless he fundamentally disagreed with violence? And the ultimate outworking of this will to liberate is the willingness to suffer without retaliation in order to draw humanity into the peace and life of nonviolence.

So it is, I believe, that the God of gentleness and peace was always there, no matter our perceptions. Indeed, I think we can progressively take every memory and retrofit them with the nonviolent presence of God in order actively to redeem and transform our past. This is part of changing mental pathways and, in turn, creating the space of a new projection on earth. Not simply an “historic peace church” (and its rooting in a particular denominational identity) but a clear and dominant sense of any Christian gathering as the breakthrough of new humanity.

Canaries, Cages, Covid and Compassion

August 7, 2020Anthropo-theology, MoviesCovid

The proverbial canary is in its cage. Someone opens the door. The pretty bird steps out, looks around, and goes straight back behind bars.

The liberator’s definition of freedom may look like the end of the world to its feathered beneficiary, even if from the outside the caged canary might seem deprived.

On the other hand, if you make a cage big and rich enough and put lots of canaries and other songbirds in there together, suddenly they produce a society and a culture that has its own definition and assertion. Maybe then the cage becomes a problem to everyone around it, because it is using up so many resources to create its gilded lifestyle, and because, incidentally, the birds make a whole lot of noise. Nevertheless and all the same, the cage continues to deny freedom to its captives.

I once visited a community in Latin America where the rooms of all the brothers were set on a gallery around a central courtyard. Someone had the bright idea of building a huge aviary in the courtyard, reaching from the ground to the roof. The birds were certainly pretty, but the first morning I was there I was awakened by this deafening blast of competing birdsong breaking out at 4.20 am, an atrocious kind of alarm-clock. Needless to say, I got away from that house and its hellish chorus at the first possible opportunity.

Is it possible that aspects of the culture and society of North America are comparable to that exaggerated aviary? North America is very large, it has an idiosyncratic sense of freedom, it makes an ear-splitting noise proclaiming it, and yet in certain respects it is still a cage. Stepping outside the aviary seems like catastrophe to many Americans.

American freedom is built upon a gigantic landmass discovered by Europeans at a point when their technological development was taking off, enabling them rapidly to assert control over the territory, its indigenous peoples, and its resources. The wide-open spaces and the relative swiftness of expansion became a sense of freedom, a phenomenon of effortless power, movement and destiny. Allied to Enlightenment values of equality, individual liberty and rights, the experience was intoxicating and defining. Soon, just behind the gun, the cotton gin, the smelting yard and the railway, came the movie camera. Not only did this freedom express itself concretely in the prairies, the mountains, the rivers, it mirrored itself to itself in an endless stream of films, set against the magnificent backdrop and following the relentless movement of humanity across it.

We also have to bear in mind what this movement of humanity was getting away from. Poverty, landlords, oppression, pogroms, all such was left behind with only the new spaces rolling out in front, “from sea to shining sea.” No wonder all the birds in the aviary sung their hearts out!

But the fact remains that this is a unique and specialized society, spiritually and materially walled off from the rest of the planet and, of course, from aspects and sub-sets of its own territory and peoples. Because no matter the crowing of the cocks and hens true freedom still lies beyond the walls of this self-constructed cage.

Concepts of individual liberty come from specific and privileged circumstances like North America and the English bourgeoisie on the crest of industrial growth and great comparative wealth. In contrast the industrial working classes in Britain and France developed a sense of identity over against the rampant individualism of the factory owners, bankers and financiers. Necessarily this was a class identity, involving the whole mass of workers, combining their power against the might of the individual owners and their top-of-the-crop families.

It is this class identity which came to color what is called “socialism,” and now so offends U.S. sensibilities, pitting a brute, ugly collectivism against the ideal beauty of the individual. The ugly “starling” collectivism is what the canaries sing against day after day, trumpeting their unique private beauty to anyone in earshot.

But the truth remains theirs is not private beauty. As underlined, it was attained and is maintained by public means, in a particular time and space, channeling exceptional privilege to the fortunate citizens within its continental boundaries. Meanwhile, there is another version of beauty and freedom which the canaries can hardly conceive, so hostile are they to what they see as the massed ranks of collective unfreedom. This is a freedom outside of their cage which they reject because they feel happier in their five-star confine.

The freedom outside the cage is created by the power of compassion. To share the life of every other creature in the world, by means of the emotion that makes us one with them even in their suffering, this is to open an endless breadth of human relation. If freedom is the sense of movement and the possibility of engaging it anytime anywhere, then the freedom of compassionate relation is infinite, while the defense of privilege is a cage. The recent politicization over Covid safety demonstrates much of what is at stake. In a recent op-ed in the New York Times Charlie Warzel compared the furor over mandated masks to the politics surrounding gun rights and the human consequences that flow from them.

“As in the gun control debate, public opinion, public health and the public good seem poised to lose out to a select set of personal freedoms. But it’s a child’s two-dimensional view of freedom — one where any suggestion of collective duty and responsibility for others become the chains of tyranny.”

Warzel goes on to say, “In this narrow worldview, freedom has a price, in the form of an “acceptable” number of human lives lost. It’s a price that will be calculated and then set by a select few. The rest of us merely pay it.” This may seem a harsh judgment but explained as the canaries’ addiction to their aviary it makes full sense. Warzel’s assessment was underlined by an editorial piece in the same newspaper on Aug 6, reporting America’s “unique failure” to get the pandemic under national control. “First, the United States has a tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions. That aversion to collective action helped lead to inadequate state lockdowns and inconsistent adherence to mask wearing based on partisanship instead of public health.”

As in gun rights the public health failure of Covid response is not an unfathomable mystery. Guns belong to the technology by which mastery over the Americas was asserted. In the hands of individuals, it provides the cumulative power of a king and army, expressed in a single trigger burst. It provides the individual with the rule of a monarch over an alien and hostile world. L’etat c’est moi! In comparison, Covid is a tiny virus, something which reverses the perspective but maintains the metaphor. Now the power is a minute pathogen set against the Leviathan of the individual. Thus, “It shall not pass,” not because of a humble, other-conscious mask, but purely by royal decree!

What is unique about humans is their limitless power of relation. As Rene Girard has shown us, this can result in unending rivalry, the source of wars and killing. Or, the very same mimetic connection can bring community, compassion and love. In the past this relation has been called “socialism” but there is an inherited element of class conflict in that political tradition, one that makes the canaries sing all the louder in opposition. Compassion, instead, invites everyone into a more deeply human life, one without violence. Indeed, if humans are to survive at all on earth then compassion must become a necessary way of life, rather than an occasional fit of sentiment. Compassion then might be called a “new socialism,” if by that we mean the compassionate elements clearly present in the old tradition now come front and center in a mode of positive human transformation. The current cultural crisis in response to Covid (and, afterward, to its aftermath) throws up the possibility of seeing everything from a revolutionary new angle. Many Americans already share a great sense of compassion. It is simply a matter of making this a human and political virtue in its own right.

The Lamb and the Stone

June 30, 2020General TheologyBlood, Foundation, Left and Right, Revelation

There is a truth of love which overtakes the heart.

As if someone slid back a panel deep in the basement of the soul, revealing a dark stream which has not seen the light for a billion years. The limpid dark water of divine love. Undertow to the universe.

Girard says there is an originary murder at the basis of humanity.

The location, the spot, the place where the murder occurs—like all associations, in sound, equipment, time—becomes sacred. There is a sense of power, fear, awe about them—the phenomenon of the sacred.

Later, when humans turn to building, it occurs to them spontaneously to make the foundation stone of a building or wall sacred—by carrying out a foundation murder or sacrifice. That way it will have numinous strength. So, we find the countless foundation sacrifices of human culture: the bones of birds. animals, children, adults, are found beneath walls, towers, corners, hearths, doorsills.  . . . from India to Mexico, from Saxon England to North Africa.

Rozafa Castle Foundation Sacrifice

The stunning visual of Rozafa castle in Albania spells out the story in one. The legend tells of three laborers building the castle wall. Despite their best efforts each night the wall would collapse; a wise man counseled them that only the sacrifice of one of the builders’ wives, mortared within the wall, would keep it strong; the wife of the youngest (of course) was chosen and she accepted her fate, but on one condition; one eye, one breast, one leg had to be left exposed in order to suckle and dandle her infant; the rest could be walled up. And so it is, the castle stands strong to this day. (The story was told to me in class by an Albanian student, while I was teaching on the foundational victim. The whole legend is in fact a classic, culturally Christian foundation story—the victim is half-revealed in a factual sense, half-revered in a superstitious sense, a kind of half-effective double transference.)

The foundation stone is sacred by virtue of the killing, by virtue of the blood, but it is the stone which becomes important for humans. The wall must stay strong. The city must endure. It is the stone which creates enclaves and houses, castles and civilizations. It is almost inconceivable for human beings to make things without the stone. The stone absorbs the life and blood of the victim. These things remain hidden in the stone. The stone stands forth strong and noble in its own right

Except, that is, until the Lamb.

The Lamb of Revelation appears in the world “as one who was slaughtered,” making plain the murdered creature by which the stone is made strong. The Lamb refuses to pour out its blood for the sake of the stone. Instead it reveals the truth of spilled blood, in its case given for and as love, but, because it is revelation, in the same moment it makes the stone weak and unstable.

This is not a happy situation for the world, and by orders of intensity. Its most treasured, original artifact—the stone—is subverted in its essential being and function. The modern world is rendered unstable at its core. You could say a nuclear reactor is simply the modern technological realization of the instability at the core of our human-spiritual condition.

But, not to worry, we still have fundamentalist Christianity! Fundamentalists repeat language of the blood, but it’s the stone they’re really interested in. By dint of a thousand years of atonement theology they have turned the thing upside down. Rather than revelation, they see the blood of the Lamb as warranting and supporting the stone. Because the blood is offered in compensation to a wrathful God, the figure of “God” becomes the apex agent of violence, a meaning that enshrines and exceeds all the violence of the world. God becomes the stone in the sky about to fall on us. Some indeed might readily admit this, because in their minds it seems like the honor and respect due to God (God can do what God likes), but it is just another version of the stone. The symbolism or conceptual place where the violent way of the world comes together most powerfully is always the stone, the foundation of the world. 

Liberal thinking doesn’t think this way. In fact, it doesn’t mind being considered irreligious: rather it takes the side of the victim and that is where its righteousness lies. Its approach seems, by definition, to be free of blood, and so it is necessarily non-foundational and righteous. But the moment it gathers in a crowd (including virtual) to stake out its position, to accuse, condemn and cancel the victim-maker, we are inevitably producing the stone on that side too. This is because humanity has not changed its core relation with violence, its generative anthropology, its root way of being. Without this radical change the intensity of liberalism’s desire to found the world on principles of justice and inclusivity will only produce a new round of the same old sacred. More subtle and diffuse perhaps, and enshrined above all in language—in staking out territory in symbolic, semiotic terms—it is nevertheless just as ferociously constructed of “stones” as any fortress. The “right side of history” can so easily mean a new sacred space, where stones are thrown, and the foundation stone laid down all over again.

The blood of the Lamb undermines all foundation stones, crying out only for nonviolence, mercy, forgiveness, and love. That is why it is so endlessly disruptive. Fundamentalist Christians are the reaction of violent history, seeking to restore the foundation stone within the very message that dissolves it. But because of the very nature of the blood of the Lamb, revealing the victim, fundamentalism is always itself destabilized. Proof of this is its central need for its own form of victim language. Abortion is right-wing Christianity’s preferred and only victim. The fetus in the womb appears separate from the conflicts and violence of adult human mimesis, so to insist on protecting this life, while forgetting all other issues of life under threat, makes for a privileged language that stops short of all other killings. But all along right-wing Christianity’s insistence on this issue shows that it shares a common worldview of the victim—while all the time seeking desperately to refound society on the stone covered with its blood. This kind of Christianity is inherently conflicted, angered, angry and unhappy, by virtue of its own core symbolism and meaning.

The bible ends with the book of Revelation, and the book of Revelation ends with a vision of the heavenly city coming to earth. The city is the city of the Lamb, but it comes “from heaven” and therefore is not founded on the originary violence at the root of our humanity. The blood of the lamb is a totally different blood, communicating only endless forgiveness and love. The New Jerusalem is made up of a vast number of stones, described in luminous detail in chapter twenty one . The city itself can itself be viewed as one huge stone, a perfect cube twelve thousand stadia long at each equal edge. But, again, this is not the stone of human culture. It is a completely different kind of stone, shot through with light. There is no violence or falsehood in the city, thus requiring no foundation to keep things in order. Only the totally nonviolent meaning of the blood of the Lamb, recreating human relation as such, is able to do this.

Image by Patty Halbeck

By and large throughout its history Christianity has missed this recreating relation in the blood of the Lamb. But our global humanity is today at a moment of crisis when it desperately needs it. How can the world founded on the stone of violence experience the nonviolent stone of the Heavenly Jerusalem? Every Christian carries it within her! It is a kind of half-light or dawn of the Lamb brought into the world by every breath of the Christian. A Christian is defined by relation with the Lamb, the relation of the Lamb, in forgiveness and compassion. The Christian is this relation.

When I slid back that panel in the basement of the soul I think what I saw there is really the energy of the Lamb coursing through history, through the universe. It is unstoppable, unquenchable, a way of being in its own right, unbeholden to mimesis either right or left. It is at the root of all things, in these latter days manifest in the world by proclamation of the Lamb.

Heart Attack!

November 8, 2019Anthropo-theology, Poetry

It’s just about a year since a heart-attack knocked me off my CASUAL perch (Carelessly Assured Serenely Uninterrupted Animate Life). A single year, I suppose, is not a whole lot of time for a commemoration, but the fact of my survival, and the alternative, make it seem a whole lot of lifetimes. All those little things that happen in everyday existence, all the hopes and dreams that continue to swirl inside your head and make life so much, well, life, none of that would exist at all for the last year if I had made my exit. How precious then is that space of time, how much worthy of a celebration!

Human body with heart, with aorta ventricle, left atrium, right atrium, superior vena cava, inferior vena cava and artery

Besides, I also completed my thirty-six sessions of cardiac rehab, becoming part of a select community of similarly aged men, plus (for some reason) a lesser number of women, all recently made conscious of their acute fragility this side of eternity. We had such a huge sense of something in common, as we hit the treadmills and exercise bikes, that we continually talked about going out for beer and pizza together. But when it came to it, we couldn’t bring ourselves. I suspect it would have felt too much like a reunion of ghosts at the local funeral parlor!

So, instead, I will try to celebrate by writing something rising from the experience and I would never have thought of before: a dialogue between a man and his own heart. You see, you never think of your heart as separate from yourself, until gnaws in your chest like a wild dog trying madly to get out. That’s when you realize that the heart is a muscle with a life of its own, and you really have to start paying attention to it.

Oh, my dear heart, what did I ever do to you for you to treat me this way?

You never cared before, you took me entirely for granted!

But how was I to know? You were so quiet and gentle, always there day and night, with your peaceful little beat, you made me take you for granted! How was I to know you could get so angry? 

Give me a break! You were always saying creepy things like “Cross your heart and hope to die!” “Eat your heart out!” “I heart you!” You knew exactly how important I was. But it never occurred to you to figure out what really made me tick? If you had a muscle strain in your leg or arm you would talk about it non-stop. But the most serious muscle in your body, you thought I worked by magic.

C’mon now. Calm down. You’re taking it all too much to heart!  (Sorry, I thought that was funny!) I was always talking about you, and in a positive way! We always said, “Follow your heart,” “The heart has its reasons which reason doesn’t have.”  All that cool romantic stuff! You had to be pleased!

Yes, and what about, “The heart is devious above all else, it is perverse,” All that Jeremiah stuff! I would get so sick and tired hearing about how wicked I was. 

Well, yes, there is that. But you have to admit, you did lead me astray a number of times

Whaattt! It was nothing to do with me, it was you with your sick imagination, I’m just a supply of motion to the propeller, it’s you and your precious brain that steers the ship!

So, you’re totally innocent. You’ve never done anything wrong?

No, I have not. I am innocent, and you are a jerk.

Listen, you’re being far too literal about everything. When we say “heart” in casual conversation we’re using a metaphor for the deepest, most essential part of the self. We’re not talking about you, that eleven-ounce muscle about the size of an average fist lodged in our chest. You have to make allowance for human language use.

So, now I’m too stupid to understand when people are talking about me, and when they mean something else. Well, let me tell you, you don’t have a word for that something else, because you don’t know what it is. But in the meantime, the truth is I AM the most essential thing in your life, I am the main event, but you don’t give me the respect you should. That whole metaphor thing is your way of wriggling out of the facts

But you just said it was my brain that made me do stuff, and now you say you really are the mainspring of life. Which is it?

I’m not arguing the point with you. You started the whole conversation because you said I’d treated you poorly. The fact is you didn’t know what I do, and now when I showed you, you come on like I’m behaving badly. But, really, I’ve always been that way, the passion of your life at its core, and you’ve been totally fine with it. I just gave you a wake-up call and now you have to change your whole way of understanding. You have a lion of desire where you thought there was a sweet little puppy, and, more to the point, the lion’s no longer locked up in its cage.

That’s crazy, really crazy. I’m not sure I want to be talking to you like this. You suddenly become this lion all untamed, and about to tear itself free from me, but somehow you always were that way, and now it’s too late for me to do anything about it! What happened to “sweetheart,” to compassion, to the heart’s heart for the weak and wounded!

There you go again, saying stuff about me for things you actually can’t make sense of. Well, I would like to help you, I really would. And maybe I will feel better about it next week, or next year. But in the meantime, I have got your attention and that makes me happy. I’m just a muscle, like you say, and my operating life has a term limit, what do you say, a shelf life? All that other stuff you talk about, you’ll have to figure that out without me.

Well, that does make sense. I do see what you mean about my sloppy metaphors, making you responsible for things which we don’t have names for. So, what happens to those things when your angry lion does finally break free? Where will my real “heart” be then? 

I guess you’ll have to wait and see. Maybe, if you get the chance, you could even let me know too!

Madness and Priesthood

August 13, 2019Anthropo-theologyMy Story

I was ordained in 1973, and resigned the priesthood in 1984.

In the Roman Catholic church priesthood is a lifelong commitment, including its core social marker, lifelong celibacy. To jump ship and get married is not even technically possible according to Canon Law (you can’t escape a solemn vow), let alone something viewed as an honorable course of action.

It is legally possible to be “returned to the lay state”–on the basis it was all a total mistake in the first place–but my own petition for dispensation disappeared in some clerical desk-drawer around 1986, and I never felt inclined to try again. I preferred to remain in the odd clinical condition which is my true and real vocation.

My mother was mentally ill—borderline psychotic, for sure. Her presenting symptoms were chronic underlying depression, triggered by postpartum crisis. But on its own this does not account for her rages which were the real pathology. Her anger was directed mostly at my father. He was not only personally culpable (for whatever grave sin she found him in), but he served as a stand-in for the general evil of England responsible for millennial Irish grievance. Although my father bore the brunt of my mother’s blitzkrieg, it was also capable of wiping the whole house clean of air and life more terminally than any atom bomb. It was not surprising I developed chronic asthma trying to vent the firestorm. But it was not enough. It could not remake a world after the apocalypse. For that only priesthood would do.

From a very early age “the priest” was the only figure of manhood put before me of any value. A paragon of virtue, truth, power, beauty, humanity. At the same time, I had my own strange, personal connection to things of the spirit, a powerful, individual relation to the man from Nazareth which in fact stood outside of the architecture of the Roman church. I also learned to pray, a constant inner exercise of breath, reaching out for life beyond the gutted atmosphere of my personal spaceship drifting on the far side of the moon.

Back then, however, spirituality and the Catholic church were impossibly intertwined and created a recipe that could only enhance the madness of my soul and social situation.

When I finally quit the priesthood—motivated in large part by the healing touch and liberating teaching of the man from Nazareth—I was able to distinguish between the meaning and impact of the Christian scriptures and tradition, and the self-serving historical structures of the church. Nevertheless, there was one thing that would not change. I could remove the the man from the madness, but I could not remove the madness from the man.

I had learned more thoroughly than a musical prodigy learns the piano. I exercised my personal priesthood from the age of six or seven forward, ministering to and mediating my mother’s depression and anger. There will be some other place where I tell the full story, but for now it’s simply a fact that I am specialist in any person who stands in the outside space, beyond the “normal” mores and values of the world. Psychosis—in one social form or other—is my wheelhouse.

Leaving the official priesthood was a necessary option for my sanity, for real connection to the world. If I had not done it there’s no doubt, I would have driven some group of people seriously nuts, or gone entirely nuts myself … or both. As it is, I have a wife and children who keep me grounded, and coming to the United States enabled me to breathe air whose atoms have not been ripped from the earth at the first dawning of conscious life. My mother responded to my bid for sanity by effectively never speaking to me again. I was to be forever outside her comforting mania.

All the same, as I say, I retain a priesthood of the borderlines. And at this point I have no desire to change. Madness comes one person at a time. If you go into a psychiatric hospital, there may be fifty patients, but each is largely lost in their own world. It’s difficult to conceive of a “church” of the mad. So it is that the ministry that I have learned at my mother’s knee always seems to be to the scattered, marginal few.

But. But.

The world is now in a place where what is “normal” is more and more deranged, both in the breakdown of nature, and in the constantly reinforced twittermania of competing voices, such that “truth” is evaporated in the internet media. Madness is becoming a way of being, and in a world of the culturally insane the ordinarily crazy may actually have a new wisdom to impart. A priesthood of madness may be the path on which we meet the man from Nazareth more surely than down the aisle of any classically proportioned cathedral. After all, what is it that drives people insane, and what is that heals them? Is it not always some form of violence that pushes them over the edge, and is it not the touch of divine nonviolence which heals?

Any priesthood today worth its salt has to be a priesthood of madness. (I think of Luis Buñuel film, Nazarín, where the priest’s constant literal practice of the gospel makes him seem crazy and a failure. But there is always a deep ambiguity and the power of the images overcomes the harsh details of the plot. It is the images (the signs) of love and compassion that endure.

The Drop That Becomes The Sea

May 19, 2019General Theology

Sometimes history hides its best secrets in plain sight. Over the past few years I have come into contact with the work of Fetullah Gulen and his followers, but only little by little understood how crucial this man and his teaching may be to the future of religion in our contemporary world. The Turkish Islamic scholar is significant for Islam in particular, but also for religion broadly, especially that of the Abrahamic traditions—Islam, Christianity, Judaism, whose members together comprise half the planet.

Gulen belongs to a revival of Islam in Turkey which, in turn, forms part of the nation’s long history as the crossroads where the Asian peninsula  bumps into Europe, a country where strands and layers of culture, east and west, meet, clash and mesh. Turkey was the home of Rumi, the mystic and poet whose name means “Roman” in Arabic and who is beloved of Muslim, Christians and non-believers alike. After the First World War the Ottoman regime, which had ruled Turkey for six centuries, collapsed and a nationalist secular government took its place. The new “Kemalist” politicians legislated against the public influence of Islam, seeking to bring Turkey up to speed with the Western nations which had, as they saw it, established an enlightened critical distance from religion.

Licensed Islamic religion and practice were still permitted in Turkey and Gulen became a government-recognized assistant imam as a teenager in 1958. But both Turkey and Gulen have spiritual energies which expand far beyond narrowly imposed constructs, and social unrest in the former and desire for religious reform in the latter continued to affect the landscape dramatically and progressively. I am not enough an expert in Turkish history to be able to summarize the turmoil in Turkish politics through the sixties all the way to the 2000s, but there were three coup d’etats in this period.

The military seem continually ready at the back door of the state apparatus to break their way in and impose physical order. The key point, however, is that against this background Gulen has continually advocated for tolerance and forgiveness, consistent with an ethic of service rather than power.  (See Christopher L. Miller and Tamer Balci, eds, The Gülen Hizmet Movement: Circumspect Activism in Faith-Based Reform, especially Tamer Balci, “Islam and Democracy in the Thought of Nursi and Gulen.”)

Gulen’s influence grew from the eighties onward. In 1976 he opened a students’ hostel offering scholarships for poorer scholars and hosting informal Quranic discussions. He called the place a “light house” (işık evler) and he invited others to follow the same model. The development of this practice became the genesis of the Gulen movement. My friend, Timur, experienced at first hand a center like this, as a teenager in his hometown in Turkey. He told me he would sleep on the floor overnight simply to soak up as much teaching and spirituality as possible. Social and political reforms in the period favored the growth of these educational centers and progressively the whole thing became a front-line cultural phenomenon. The impression is of a profound religious and cultural thirst which Gulen was able to respond to, despite the harsh opposition sometimes experienced by the students. Timur says he was beaten up in school by teachers, when they understood he was attending a Gulen center! But Gulen’s teaching was always a matter of nonviolent influence on civil society, not a theocratic movement taking over the state apparatus. His followers adopted the name Hizmet, which means service, emphasizing an attitude of self-giving rather the pursuit of power. This approach has been misunderstood and opposed both by the traditional secularists, who see it as yet another religious threat to their vision of society, and by hardline Islamists who see it as rolling over to the West and “pro-American.”

Into this already toxic mix we must also insert the current president of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, and his political party (Justice and Development, AKP). Gulen and Erdogan were initially allies, with Erdogan espousing an Islamic version of society and readily employing Hizmet people. The Hizmet movement offered the most prepared cadre of activists, able to staff schools, universities, the media, the judiciary etc., and they quickly rose to prominence. But fault-lines soon developed, and Erdogan conceived a bitter hatred for Gulen because he would not teach his followers to embrace the normal practice of power.

Erdogan rose to success with the return of Islamic religion to the public square, but he did not change his political philosophy from a standard worldly function of religion–used to undergird systems of manipulation and control. In contrast, Gulen and his followers did not want to promote yet another authoritarian, self-serving political apparatus.  The 2013 corruption revelations in the Turkish government, including members of Erdgan’s own family,  were broadcast by Hizmet media outlets and in some instances prosecuted by lawyers influenced by Gulen’s thought. Erdogan hit back by accusing Gulen of creating a “state within the state” and seeking to overthrow the government. With the upside-down thinking only contemporary media propaganda can effect, Erdogan has branded Gulen as a terrorist and enemy of Turkey, going on to accuse him of responsibility for the farcical but still tragic, failed coup attempt in 2016. Very few Western journalists believe Erdogan and his state-run media’s narrative, but, at the same time, the mere fact of its existence seems continually to put a question mark over the Hizmet phenomenon. Such a broad yet shadowy group must still have clandestine motives, especially if it is Islamic! This is where I think the principle of nonviolence is so crucial. There can be absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to influence and affect society for the better–on the contrary!–so long as violence is not employed as a motive or means. I have learned at first hand the negative consequences of Erdogan’s campaign in the dozens of Turkish men and women, disciples of Gulen, who have lost jobs in Turkey, been imprisoned and dare not return, and whose relatives are in danger simply because they are linked to them. At the same time, I have continually been impressed by the lack of hatred in these individuals, their willingness to endure, and their general response of non-retaliation. If I judge by Jesus’ principle of “by their fruits you shall know them,” then I have to believe in the authenticity of Fetullah Gulen and his teaching.

So where did this principle come from? Timur sent me a wonderful poem by a Sufi writer, Yunus Emre, entitled The Drop That Became The Sea.

It includes the following lines, and Timur told me that Gulen used the second stanza “thousands of times” in his sermons and books.

A dervish needs a wounded heart and eyes full of tears.
He needs to be as easy going as a sheep.
You can’t be a dervish.

He must be without hands when someone hits him.
He must be tongueless when cursed.
A dervish needs to be without any desire.
You can’t be a dervish.

You make a lot of sounds with your tongue, meaningful things.
You get angry about this and that.
You can’t be a dervish.

If it were all right to be angry on this path,
Muhammad himself would have gotten angry.
Because of your anger, you can’t be a dervish.

Gulen used this verse to engender nonviolence in his students. It was only later he understood this was already the teaching of Jesus. Timur also sent me a link to a recent sermon in which Gulen recognizes Jesus as the source of such instruction. The sermon is in Turkish but Timur translated the relevant portion. Gulen is talking about his revised version of a proverb. It is “‘If you worry  that someone will hurt you, try to soften them with your kindness, offer your help.’” Then Gulen comments, “When I was making my own version of this proverb, I was not aware of the message of Master Blessed Messiah on this topic. Then I learned that (the) … Master of Compassion, Mercy, and Generosity says: ‘The real kindness is not returning a kindness, it is responding to unkind with kindness’. So, if someone is running to you with the intent to bite you like an animal, you should treat them like a human and disable their harm with kindness.’” (Timur confirms that “Master Blessed Messiah” is a common Islamic honorific for Jesus.)

Timur concludes with a quote from the Quran: “The good deed and the evil deed cannot be equal. Repel (the evil) with goodness and kindness (i.e. Allah ordered the faithful believers to be patient at the time of anger, and to excuse those who treat them badly), then verily! the one who tries to be your enemy could become a close friend.”

So, it becomes obvious that there’s a living, authentic strand of nonviolence in Islam, one which Gulen continues to distill and bring to prominence. But he also recognizes that it goes back scripturally to Jesus. Here is something of immense importance for Christians and Muslims to share together. And in this connection it is also worth pointing to an essential  crux of concern between Islam and Christianity: the death of Jesus. There is a verse in the Quran (Q4:157) which seems to claim that Jesus did not in fact die on the cross. The interpretation of the verse is debated, but whatever the Quran verse does in fact intend Jesus’ death is obviously pivotal to any standard version of Christian faith practiced today. If, then, there is a breakthrough possibility for Muslims to see Jesus’ death as the Messiah’s own supreme witness of non-retaliation and forgiveness, so it becomes easier for interfaith dialogue to progress. We could also put it the other way round. If both religions—Islam and Christianity—begin to see nonviolence as the revelation of the character of God then it is not unreasonable to think God’s Messiah might indeed agree to suffer to the point of death in order to demonstrate exactly that truth. In any case, Gulen is a key teacher in the 21st century enabling both religions to know that this is truly the meaning of God and, therefore, the journey and destiny of all his believers.

The Bridge

October 18, 2018Poetry

There’s a bridge in San Francisco                                                                                

It runs clear across the bay

Bearing pilgrims to the winelands

To hope, and laugh and pray

The steel, the stone, the trusses

The piers, the towers, the spans,

My soul’s made of these connections

Forged hard for a builder’s plans

There’s a bridge in San Francisco

Come, let’s across the straits!

Let’s ride the crimson pillars

To where angels hold the gates

They’ll offer us the vintage

Of spaces never known

The grapes of peace and gentleness

That one day we’ll call home

Terry Was My Brother

September 24, 2017Anthropo-theology, Poetry

This is a quite personal response to my brother’s death. I am posting it here, among my other blogs, because I wish these words as a farewell to Terry, and I had no other public setting in which to deliver them.

I do not remember his birth–there were under two years between us. But I remember him being there, a new and constant presence among my mother’s things-to-do and bright roses on the wall of the back yard in 1949. He lay in his pram and I didn’t know his face but I knew he was somebody and he was there.

He was there when my aunt screamed in panic up the stairs, telling me and my older sister to get out of the bathroom and come down and shelter with the rest of the family under the kitchen table. A firework display in a nearby park resulted in loud explosions, and my mother and aunt were certain Hitler had come back and launched a deadly attack with rockets.

Everything in those days was after-the-war, and that went on all the way through until the sixties. Terry and his whole generation came of age in the sixties.

Before that decade most of our growing up was in the out-of-the-way Isle of Wight. We moved to the island in 1953, taking the ferry from Portsmouth across the shallow strip of water separating it from the English mainland. It was a strange place whose isolation was chosen by the authorities as ideal setting for a maximum security prison, H.M.P. Parkhurst. Our father worked as a Prison (Corrrections) Officer and had taken a job in Parkhurst as a hospital orderly, no doubt attracted by special wage incentives. For five years we shared the situation of those detained at the center of the island. Our only external reference points were the Catholic Church, St. Thomas in Newport, and our primary school, Carisbrooke Convent, with its looming feudal backdrop of a Norman castle.

Terry formed part of a trio, with myself and our younger sister, banded together in a hard, unlikely world. We played around the housing estate where the families of the prison officers lived, or on the clifftop farm where our mother had purchased an ex-army billet hut as unofficial family camp. Terry was a seamless part of that insular childhood experience: pretending to be pirates, climbing trees, following trails, building forts, creating a story saga around our toy plastic Indians, running away from gangs, confronting bullies.

He was intensely loyal. After we first moved and started at our convent primary school–which of course was not the local state school–a bunch of prison kids would steal our caps and rough us up as we walked home from the bus-stop. Deciding on a guerilla tactic we hid in the bushes and jumped on one of the meanest boys who was about our size, pummeling him with our little fists. Our success in dealing with this boy encouraged us to move on to the leader who was head and shoulders above us both. Again we jumped from the bushes, but he handed us a solid pasting and we had to turn and run. My brother took his lumps without flinching. And after that the gang did not bother us again.

Terry’s loyalty was a given, demonstrated time and again throughout his life. But there is passion which cuts deeper even than loyalty. We choose whom we are loyal to; passion chooses its objects for us. The objects of Terry’s passion, who knows? But they were certainly there.

The family moved to Portsmouth at the end of the island sojourn, but in a way we remained our own little island, enclosed in family bounds of church and home. It was only after we started to set out on individual life journeys that the wider world really confronted us, stretching loyalties while provoking passions. One time Terry came to visit me as a young man. It was likely the winter of 1968. I was at Buckden Towers, an historically B-list medieval building, just off the Great North Road, but displaying a noble skyline of castellated walls and three-storied keep. There was a fundraiser underway, with lots of alcohol, disco lights and music. Terry was working at a pig farm at the time, shortly after he had been told to leave the seminary in Ireland and never try a vocation to the priesthood anywhere else. He had a huge Afro haircut, long black greatcoat and a hacking cough. There were flecks of straw in his hair and on his coat, and his conversation was largely about how smart pigs were. It looked like he’d been living with them, just like the proverbial Prodigal Son. After he downed a few drinks he made his way to the roof of the Towers and stood looking out from the shaky battlements, glass in hand. I’d never seen him so dark, and felt it necessary to go back to check on him. What was he staring at as he gazed over the walls into the cold, inky night?  I never really knew, but it was desperate and terrible.

Somehow the Terry of his twenties dealt with his demons. And in so doing he helped me a great deal. More than he really knew. One of the reasons I went to spend time with him in England before he died was to tell him how much he meant to me in my own life. Somewhere in the same period as that dark visit to Buckden, Terry came to see me at another place where I was staying, a house in Oxfordshire attached to a Jesuit teaching institution, Heythrop College. We stayed up late in the community kitchen warmed by the big black Aga stove, and Terry told me about a book he’d read, Catcher in the Rye. We shared Holden Caulfield’s corrosive contempt for phony situations and people. Most of all, I saw my brother Terry standing up to be his own person in a difficult world, in a way that I had yet to manage. I saw that in many ways he was braver and more mature than me.

Others of Salinger’s novels made an ever greater impression on Terry. Those relating the story of the prodigiously talented Glass family, Raise High The Roof Beams, Carpenter and Franny and Zooey, were particularly beloved. At every opportunity he would praise these books as having a near-biblical worth. Why did Terry value so highly a story about a guy named Seymour who did not show up at his own wedding and a few years later committed suicide, yet whose memory and writings remained a spiritual treasure for his family?

In the light of this question, it is impossible not to mention my own wedding in 1986, and the fact that Terry did indeed show up, and did so to protest. He was grateful to be escorted out of the church before the beginning of the service by the best man and ushers, but he waited at the gate until the ceremony was over. It was a bit of a shock to see his ravaged face as I and Linda emerged in the courtyard to the strains of the Wedding March. This was another instance of loyalty–Terry took my mother’s part when she saw my getting married as legally inadmissible (given that I had taken a vow of celibacy in the R.C. church). I know Terry–certainly the Holden Caulfield Terry–did not want to do this, but blood overruled him. (At the same time, in hindsight, I cannot help but find more than a little subversive irony in Terry’s protest: in the end he was the only one of my family actually to show up at the wedding!)

Before all that happened, during the late 70’s, Terry came to work with me at Buckden Towers. He had returned to his studies and got a degree from UMIST, but when he was at a loose end after graduation I asked him to join me at the Towers. That half-millennial pile had emerged as a center of an energetic youth ministry fired by the spiritual renewal taking place in those years. The year he spent at Buckden was a happy time. He had undergone his own progressively deepened spiritual experience and this, together with his genial manner, Woodbine cigarettes and scorching left-wing analysis made him an object of both affection and fascination for the young people who would gather there. For me personally he represented a support I did not find in the religious order to which I belonged. When he left the Towers, that, and a number of other factors, began my own step by step separation from the life I was in. It was a journey which would result in a final break in 1984, and then that rather ill-tempered wedding two years later.

Terry took my mother’s part, but then he saw it as his job to effect a kind of reconciliation. After eight years he managed to get her to agree to meet me. It was an odd encounter but Terry saw it as a duty accomplished, squaring his loyalties both to her and to me. A few years later he also managed to arrange a meeting between my mother and my children–none of whom she had seen. My older two remember it and I am glad they had the chance of at least one physical memory of their grandmother. Terry was very satisfied that he had connected these pieces of the puzzle. Shortly before he died he bought Claddagh rings for each of my kids–“hands across the ocean”–and I know he was pleased that he had preserved that bit of the family heritage somewhat against the odds.

Terry never married. When the Irish say this about an older man they tend to do so with a mixture of sadness and approval. As if there is something quite noble about the solitary state–more often than not a matter of selfless service to said individual’s mother. There were apparently a couple of close brushes with the opposite sex. He told me about a woman from Iceland, and another from the Caribbean who had three children. When informed about the latter our mother remarked along the lines of “So, who would look after me?” And that, as they say, was that. But I never got the feeling these were huge losses for Terry. Whatever his passion was it carried him gracefully along the tracks of bachelorhood. (He once said to me–somewhere to the latter part of my own time in a religious order–“I think I would be better suited to your life, and you would be to mine.”)

So, about that attempt of his to be a priest? When he was eighteen Terry joined a Catholic missionary organization and seminary in Dublin, Ireland, but after a year he was told to leave. He wandered around Dublin for a couple of days, before finally heading back to England. It was following this he took work on the pig farm. To be told not to try anywhere else meant his superiors saw something they deemed a deal-breaker, not simply a poor fit. It’s impossible to know at this distance what that was; and why should I even bother? Well, it seemed Terry left money in his will to this same organization. The end of his life and his dispositions for his estate mirror something right at its outset, and they look like some kind of settling of accounts. My personal opinion is that we can never settle accounts: life is a free gift, and whatever we take from it can only be compensated by more absolutely free giving. And indeed, this could also have been what my brother was doing in a roundabout Zen way! However, why give freely to this organization, when there are so many urgent needs in the world?

Ultimately it is about where your passion lies, and it was perhaps the day of his death that displayed this most poignantly in Terry.

As it turned out I was alone with him. We’d had visits from the Cancer specialist and the Palliative Care doctor; one expected Terry to recover, the other that he still had weeks to live. Before that, about 11.00am, I prayed with him, giving thanks for Terry’s whole life and asking for various blessings on relatives and the world. The room was full of morning sun, Terry was very peaceful, his face and breathing in repose. The one point where he roused himself to an “Amen” was when we prayed for the R.C. church.

The priest came around 2.00. His name was Fr. Sean and he said one word, “Terry,” and my brother came out of his doze as if he’d been touched by an electric probe. He tried to lever himself up on his pillows and at the same time he tore off his oxygen mask. At this point his saturation levels were between 70 and 50 on pure O2 which means it was very dangerous to remove the mask. (Anything less than 90 is low.) We called the nurse and she got the mask back on again. The moment she left he pulled it off once more and this time his eyes rolled up and he went unconscious. I put the mask back on and his eyes returned to focus. I was now standing guard and the priest proceeded with communion and anointing. I extended the mask off his face for him to receive the wafer and sprung it straight back. When it came to the anointing Terry held out his arms rigidly in front of him like someone doing a strength exercise or some kind of parade ground salute. The muscles of his upper arms began to buckle and pop but he held the position with superhuman will-power until the priest had finished putting the oil on his hands. I don’t know why Fr. Sean didn’t tell him to relax and put his hands down on the covers.

The priest left. Shortly after they brought some lunch. Terry had a few mouthfuls and a sip or two of juice. I went out myself to get a drink. When I got back his breathing had changed. Terry died at 3.40. Without any kind of struggle. He just slipped away. His passion done.

Last year, shortly after Terry was first diagnosed with cancer, he sent me this message. “Thankfully I have not been really worried or concerned by the cancer. Do you remember the old hymn or poem that ended, ‘The child of God can fear no ill, his chosen dread no foe, we leave our fate to thee and wait thy bidding when we go; it’s not from chance our comfort springs, Thou are our trust, O king of kings.’ Guess I must actually believe that.”

Flashback. It’s 1979, and Buckden again. It’s the end of the summer and I am having an asthma attack. I was hardly getting episodes at all in those days, and yet somehow I feel this one is dangerous. I ask Terry to sleep in the room next to me, not confident I could get anyone in the community to respond promptly or sympathetically. Sure enough, in the small hours it is a crisis. I knock desperately on the wall and Terry does not need to be asked twice. He at once summons the doctor. The man arrives with his Gladstone, gets out a needle and shoots me with adrenalin. The transformation is immediate, miraculous. I have never quite experienced anything like it, before or since. Free flowing breath and a strong heart, who would not give the skies above for this? I pray that my brother Terry gets some crazy other-than-medical adrenalin in those small hours and remote rooms we call death.

Subversive Semiotics: Scorsese’s Not-So-Silent “Silence”

June 14, 2017Anthropo-theology, Movies

The latest film from auteur, Martin Scorsese, continues his fascination with Christian themes, evident from his very first movies and climaxing in 1988 with The Last Temptation of Christ. But this 2016 offering delves more deeply than his earlier preoccupations and easy box-office draws of guilt, sex and death. Centered on the empty space where faith lives, the whole movie shudders with the terror and joy of living in that space. As such it is by far Scorsese’s most religious movie, one which turns in near orbit to the heart of Christian meaning. In the words of the Newsweek review it “feels close to a state of grace.” 

Silence tells the story of Jesuit priests fallen foul of 17th century Japanese state policy to root out Christianity from the nation, concentrating particularly on the coastal areas of Nagasaki where the faith of Jesus has gained a foothold. The film is based on the 1966 novel of the same name by Shusaku Endo. The movie narrative remains faithful to the cruel dilemma presented in the book and, on one level, to its title theme, communicated with echoing intensity in the written story, that of God’s apparent silence in the face of appalling suffering.

But Scorsese as director does not just tell a story, he presents us with a sumptuous gallery of scenes and images. The sea and its beating waves are a constant motif, signaling the unbridgeable isolation of the Jesuit missionaries, way beyond return to their native Portugal. The implacable sea is also an instrument of torture for the island Christians, hung on crosses before the incoming tide, battered and swamped until their spirits give out. But then there is this. 

The image of Christ is also continuously represented– hung on the cross, the Lamb of God standing defenceless, or a face gazing serene and unflinching out into the world. It is this portraiture–always itself a figure of torture–which acts as an unyielding counterpoint to the brutal campaign of violence carried out by the authorities.

The dilemma standing before the priests is, first, whether or not to advocate apostasy among the Japanese Christians rather than see them continue to suffer this campaign, and then, ultimately, whether or not to apostatize themselves–the last condition for its cessation. Our attention is riveted by this enforced decision, but underlying it and informing it all the way through is a profound, often mind-bending discussion on what is actually at stake.

Toward the end of the movie the central Jesuit character, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield), has a conversation with his former teacher and mentor, a Jesuit who has already apostatized, Ferreira (Liam Neeson). Ferreira tells him that the Japanese Christians are not real Christians, because the word used for “the Son of God” is the same Japanese expression as for the midday sun! They do not believe in “Deus” (scholastic Latin for “God”), so why put them through torture for the sake of a phony belief!

This is an argument by one priest to another. Meanwhile the Japanese authorities have something quite different bothering them. They are concerned to keep encroaching Western nations out of Japan–Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands. And they see Christianity as a bridgehead for this encroachment. Their concern was doubtless valid, but as they argue with Rodrigues they claim that Christianity cannot possibly take root in Japan because it was alien to its soil. Saying so they somehow manage to ignore the multiple thousands of existing Christian converts, plus their own ferocious effort to eradicate what is apparently unable to put down roots. Essentially, however, their argument is not empirical. They are claiming on authority to decide what takes root and what cannot. They are the shogunate officer and warrior class, the appointed curators of what is Japanese.

In the course of this authoritative argument, however, they quote a Japanese saying and suddenly we are at another level altogether. “Mountains and rivers can be moved. But man’s nature cannot be moved.” I do not think this line is in Endo’s book, in which case the screenwriting of Silence adds a crucial twist, suggesting that the thing at stake is not who is in charge, but what, in the end, it means to be human.

This is a hugely different question and it is at this level that the repeated images of Christ–unfailingly nonretaliatory and nonviolent–transcend the eponymous silence of God. Indeed, the test of apostasy is to trample on an image of Christ and this gives Scorsese endless occasions throughout the movie to render a powerful semiotics of the nonretaliation of the Christ. Jesus again and again has a foot planted on his face and not once is there a glimmer of revenge.

Is not this perhaps the deafening “silence” that is complained about? The fact that the God of Jesus cannot and will not intervene violently, even to end abusive violation of his own revealed image? In any case, the authorities are obsessively concerned to eliminate these symbols of Jesus when kept by Christians, sensing that somehow they are key to the meaning and communication of the faith. I do not know what the actual attitude of the Nagasaki Christians or the authorities was toward the images–whether or not they regarded them superstitiously as some kind of object-with-power. But there can be no doubt that Scorsese choreographs the figures and faces for their iconic value, representing exactly the other nature which the saying about mountains and rivers deemed impossible.

In which case Ferreira–at least in the world of the movie–was entirely wrong. The Japanese Christians were real Christians, because they treasured the nonviolent semiotics of the cross. In Silence Scorsese has articulated, as artist and director, a clamant cinema of Jesus’ nonretaliation and its ultimate victory. The final frame of the movie and its sudden close-up makes this unquestionable. If you have not seen the movie treat yourself for the sake of all the wonderful screenplay, but above all the “apocalyptic” (revelatory) finale.

Silence speaks louder than words, louder than apostasy itself.

Alien: Covenant. A Satan Worth Seeing!

June 2, 2017Anthropo-theology, Movies

(Warning: thematic spoilers.)

Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant (2017) is a meditation on actual human meaning painted across the aching canvas of outer space and set off by the placenta-toned hues of chest-bursting Xenomorphs, the undisputed cinema icons of human mimesis, misery and violence.

The titular spaceship, “The Covenant,” is the painting’s golden frame, a beautiful artefact, gliding effortlessly across the stars like the bone-weapon flung triumphantly into the sky all those years ago in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. The craft carries 2000 chosen people plus embryos, pilgrim colonists, to a new home on a distant planet. But with whom do they make the covenant?

The film begins with a 2001: A Space Odyssey style conversation between computer intelligence and its human master. It is set in the exquisite calm of high culture, a white room with modernist picture window looking out on wilderness landscape, and masterpieces scattered around like a billionaire’s eat-your-heart-out collection, Carlo Bugatti throne, Steinway Grand Piano, Piero Della Francesca’s Nativity, an image of Michelangelo’s David, and, for audio, Wagner’s Entry of the Gods. The scene connects to the movie’s prequel, Prometheus (2012): it fills in that movie’s backstory of Peter Weyland, the said billionaire, funding a quest in space to find the origins of human existence, including his own selfish pursuit of immortality. Here he is talking to the android who is his creation and will help him in the quest. But it is not Weyland who is the most important figure in the scene; rather it is the creation who proceeds to name himself triumphantly after Michelangelo’s biblical David and then play the Nazi-favorite Wagner piece. He resents his role as servant. In the flicker of an eye we can see that he does not want to pour Weyland’s tea!

The Covenant sails on its light-speed journey with its covenant god watching over it. The constant connection with and contrast to the Judaeo-Christian narrative tells us that, along with the CGI thrills, there is a theological imagination at work. There is the Nativity artwork at the beginning, the eponym of the spacecraft, multiple (if somewhat incoherent) references to faith and belief, as well as several subtle nods to the gospel story.

But the god at work is not a biblical god of justice or peace. As imaged so powerfully by the Xenomorphs it is one of ferocious rivalry. In fact it is David who little by little emerges as Lucifer, a pure rival to his creator.

He explicitly quotes Milton’s Paradise Lost, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” and talks eloquently of his superiority.

He claims precedence over humans because he knows his creator, and they do not, plus he can live indefinitely, and they cannot. But, at the same time, David has an intense case of creator envy. He longs to produce something as wonderful as poetry or music. He has fashioned primitive wind instruments for himself, but we cannot be sure whether what he plays is not plagiarised from human composers. However, what he really can do is create killing machines. Without giving too much away, we see that he does not hesitate to destroy, and on a metaphysical level, in his quest for superiority.

However, as you watch this drama unfold you begin to think that it is the very fact that humans do not know their creator with certainty that opens the space in them for compassion and, indeed, creativity. A machine can only mimic. A human has that empty space inside (parallel to the vastness of outer space) which allows them to give themselves, to surrender self to “empty space,” and in the moment allow something loving and new to be generated. If “a synthetic” (as David calls himself) should ever attain to that empty space it too could create and truly be equal to its creator.

David cannot or will not dissociate himself from rivalry with his maker. In which case, far from being purely a machine he is in fact a perfect image of the human! A robot-as-rival is a perfect movie image of the human filled up with the other as enemy. He or she is in lock-step with the other, always seeking to emulate and yet outdo. A rival is a robot, fixed mechanically to the being of the other, trying futilely to attain freedom in that last explosive theophany of conquest. This is the satan, the rival who cannot let go, who becomes a robot of desire, and will go down in flames rather than do so.

David is probably the best screen Satan ever. His is the “alien covenant,”  one of rivalry and violence, the one that will engulf the world in destruction unless we learn the empty space of forgiveness and love. If you’re in any way involved in teaching Christians about the meaning of their scripture, bring them to see and understand this movie!

(P.S. In the prequel, Prometheus, the main protagonist, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, wore a cross around her neck, as a sign of overarching faith, something resented by David. In Alien: Covenant the main female protagonist, Daniels Branson,  wears an iron nail on a leather band around her neck. It has an ordinary meaning–she wants to build a log cabin on the new planet–but the contrast with Prometheus is unmistakable. Is the iron nail of Alien: Covenant the rivalry and violence that crucified Jesus? In the imaginal universe of movies it does not matter if a particular trope is fully intended by the director or not: the answer here has to be “Yes!” In the theological logic of these two movies a 21st century version of the work of the cross is becoming more and more difficult to miss.)

Primal Soup for Emerging “New Cell” Christianity

February 12, 2017Anthropo-theology

I had a conversation with a priest friend. He described a more or less perfect “church campus” in a small North Eastern boutique town. There is the venerable town-center worship center, behind it an education facility, a couple of blocks away a rural poverty support program, and on the corner a second-hand store helping fund the social-service outreach. But despite its evident virtue the church campus is not attracting newcomers. The church is stagnant, in fact slowly dying.

What are they doing wrong?

Church and worship have to do with the in-breaking of transcendence, and it seems that the average citizen of the small town finds her transcendence elsewhere; or nowhere.

In fact old transcendence itself seems to be dying, and perhaps directly under the cultural impact of the gospel. Gone is the great-deity-on-high and with it the threat of eternal consequences, and instead there is a questioning of power itself and the violence that underpins it. The question could take us on several related rabbit trails (e.g. some churches specialize in preserving or restoring that sense of violent power within the four walls of their building), but let me stick to an image that struck me and I shared with my friend.

Life in an evolutionary sense emerged from a soup of proteins that somehow combined into the primitive single cell. The “somehow” is not the question. What is relevant is the background chaos of materials which provided the necessary environment from which life came.  It is the “culture medium” which is critical in producing life.

The account of the first Pentecost tells us the Spirit created the first primitive church out of a babble of tongues. It hearkens us back to the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis. According to Walter Brueggemann the scattering that the Lord brought about, produced by the confusion of tongues, was for the sake of a larger creative purpose of ingathering and unity. And of course we see that in the outpouring of Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the Spirit of boundary-breaking nonviolence overcoming difference and separation in forgiving love.

What if today we are witnessing another kind of scattering? One not signaled by diversity of languages (we have facebook to translate for us), but by the breakdown and chaos of even more closely identifying structures of specialness and difference. We have a fragmentation and dissonance within “natural” unities such as race, nation, gender, along with a media which heightens the discord with every voice, opinion and “alternative fact” as valid as the next. Fake news is the news: there is a breakdown of “truth” itself. And with that, of course, there is the critically heightened sense of violence, precisely because unified structures of meaning and truth–single narratives–are there to protect against rivalry and conflict, against violence itself.

This then is the culture medium where the gospel word should be operating, in which it announces its alternative truth of unbounded love in the space of agitation and disarray. Respect for difference is not enough: there has to be the positive experience of transforming love “by which everyone will know you are my disciples.” This kind of love reaches out as well to those who feel impelled to recreate old unities for the sake of fending off the sense of violence. The fragmentation of “natural” unities is, therefore, in order to bring about a new kind of humanity. It is the creative space, like the confusion of languages, in which a genuinely new life of positive love can emerge. Without this present-day chaotic medium we would never be moved to produce this self-replicating “cell” of new human being.

Paradoxically, the gospel’s most natural sphere is not the settled order, but the place where the apparent virtues of such an order break down–in the lives of individuals who experience it as hurt and violence: the marginalized, the violated, the oppressed. The fact that the church campus I described is concerned for the poor cannot preclude that at some point it belongs itself to macro structures which create the poor (e.g. privilege, war, class etc.) The poor have always been blessed by the gospel, but today we have all entered a new kind of poverty where violence itself impoverishes our existence. And so that other beatitude, which is ineptly translated “blessed are the meek,” becomes first in significance. “Blessed are the nonviolent” is the joyful meaning of the gospel for those who consciously opt for it, out of a culture of violence, out of the generative roots of culture exposed to the light as violence.

So the gospel becomes the ability to live in this space with transcendent love, forgiveness and peace. Blessed are the nonviolent for they shall inherit the earth! 

The Spectacle of Compassion

December 3, 2016Movies

And when all the people who had gathered for the spectacle saw what had taken place, they returned home beating their breasts. (Lk. 23:48)

Two movies about war are currently in the theatres. One directed by Ang Lee, the other by Mel Gibson.

At the heart of both movies is an intense and powerful spectacle around which the rest of the story revolves and which rivets attention. Of course all movies are spectacle, and war is so often the subject of movies because it provides such concentrated material for spectacle: what can be more gripping to an observer than the sight of many people dying? Examples multiply in the memory:  All Quiet on Western Front, Lawrence of Arabia Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Cross of Iron, Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, Fury. The list goes on and on

But there is something much more deliberate and reflective in both these recent offerings.

The first, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, pivots on a halftime show at a Thanksgiving Football Game in Dallas, Texas.

The other, Hacksaw Ridge, climaxes in a set-piece WW2 battle on Okinawa Island, happening at the top of the eponymous ridge which looms up on screen like a terrifying stage seen from the orchestra pit, a huge escarpment which the soldiers must finally climb to make their appearance and be blown to bits.

 A sense of spectacle as spectacle undergirds both movies, a conscious meta-awareness of what exactly it is we are waiting for and watching when we watch.

A philosophical group called “Situationists” argued that society itself has devolved into spectacle. And they said this before the internet age. One of their leading figures, Guy Debord, explained “The spectacle is not a collection of images rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” He saw the enormous upsurge of electronic images as a manipulation of life by consumer culture, not real relationships. There is truth in this (especially from a mimetic perspective), but what he perhaps missed was the fact that society has always been based around the spectacle of sacrifice. The original or ur-spectacle is the killing of the collective victim. What is different today is that almost everything is spectacle. But at the same time–as these two movies illustrate–spectacle is coming consciously to recognize the violence and victim at its heart. It does so by means of the lightning strike of a radical human alternative– compassion.

The story of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, focuses on a squad of soldiers who were involved in a vicious firefight caught on camera in Iraq. The news footage made them heroes, and they return stateside on a promotional tour, fawned on and feted, driven round in a stretch Hummer by a movie agent who never stops talking up a deal on the phone. Everything leads to their centrepiece appearance at the halftime show, directly following a song from the early Beyoncé (Destiny’s Child), “Soldier.”  There is a seamless continuity between the war and the entertainment industry, while the men who were actually in the battle seem almost psychotically detached from what is going on around them. There is a constant sense of danger in this detachment, until at one crucial moment the key soldier who provides the main narrative thread breaks and begins to weep. A tear on the face of this once-innocent soldier breaks the manic continuity and rips it apart. I have called moments like this in other movies “the photon of compassion,” the point where the dizzying vortex of violent images suddenly opens to the new transcendence of compassion arising historically from the Risen Crucified.

Spectacle itself is in crisis. It is no longer able to bring sacrificial resolution; so it is always amping up the images, the violence, the desire. But then, out of the intolerable danger, compassion appears.

Next, Gibson.

No one does violence like Gibson does. There is a transparency, a visibility of violence that is in many ways unique to Gibson. It is not pleasant. It is not moral. It is structural.

Watching a movie by Gibson is as if the human tissue itself is stretched out as screen and image. It is as if the Girardian foundation of culture in the body of the victim has become violently visible in the function of the movie camera itself: the body of the victim is rendered in and as the apparatus of spectacle. Directors like Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs) and Tarantino (Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained) are known to create an aesthetic out of violence.  The vivid glaze on the surface of the screen is made out of blood and cruelty. Even with these directors there is something revelatory. But it is too slick, too knowing and collusive. With Gibson there is a deep structural unease, a deliberate lack of comfort. As the body count rises and the flesh wounds multiply we find it more and more difficult to collude. The glaze is too layered, too thick! We HAVE to notice it. This has been interpreted as bravado, as a sheer liking for violence. This is even possibly true. But his three last movies, Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto, and now Hacksaw Ridge, all have an explicitly biblical-revelatory frame, which makes it impossible to avoid spiritual responsibility for what we are watching. The Passion of the Christ is seen among liberal Christians as reflecting an appalling atonement theology: violence before God saves us from our sins. This, I think, is a mental alibi showing zero sense of the art and meaning of cinema. The biblical framework in these Gibson movies is an explicit affirmation of a revelatory process that is working itself out in the cinematic representation of violence.

Girard actually made this point about Gibson’s movie, comparing its graphic realism to the work of Renaissance artists like Hieronymous Bosch, Matthias Grunewald, and Caravaggio. (He doesn’t mention the 20th century Irish artist, Francis Bacon, but Bacon’s visceral crucifixions would surely provide a bridge between Renaissance art and Gibson’s bloody cinema:  Bacon said, “it was just an act of man’s behaviour to another.” )

Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge lacks the teardrop of compassion. (The end of The Passion had a giant one falling from the sky: was it God, the universe or cinema itself which wept?) What Hacksaw does have is the prolonged, death-defying action of the central character, a medic who refuses to carry a gun but carries a bible and bears 75 wounded men to safety during the course of the battle. The movie is based on the true story of Desmond Doss, Seventh Day Adventist who joined the army but refused to carry a weapon. At the end of the movie Doss, himself seriously wounded, is lowered on a stretcher from the ridge. The camera pans below the body as it is stretched out in the sky above. It is a moment of gospel transcendence, the photon of compassion.

“And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky and all the tribes of the earth will mourn.”

These two movies are scintilla of that sign, glimmering in the semiotic sky of the movies.

Resurrection in a Time of Victims

November 16, 2016Anthropo-theology

Resurrection is the beginning of another earth. And another heaven.

Resurrection–despite its general amazement factor as a miracle–has remained the poor relation of gospel theology: e.g. “incarnation” and “atonement.” 

For “the Second Person of the Trinity” resurrection kind of goes with the territory, and when it comes to dealing with human sin Jesus’ death is what really counts.

To understand the importance of the resurrection of Jesus, we must first make clear that resurrection cannot be separated from the cross. It is the resurrection of the Crucified victim.

See Paul’s famous statement in Philippians.

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering, being conformed to him in his death, so that I may somehow attain to the resurrection of the dead.”

You see here how entangled are the two themes. The statement is chiastic, with the resurrection at both ends, and the suffering and death as the cross-over in the middle. You cannot separate the two–they are like two twined strands of DNA. 

The Crucified is raised! And we have always to maintain this structural reality: it is the total overturning, through nonviolence, of a death sentence imposed by the powers of this world. Only on this basis can we understand Girard’s famous revelation of the victim. In terms of the gospel, it is only because the Crucified is raised as peace that we know the victim of collective human violence is innocent.

But today because the victim stares us in the face everywhere we continue to forget the structural event that made it happen. We separate the Crucified from Resurrection.

As hinted above, a lot of the blame for this must fall on past theology. In the past the teaching of resurrection was swallowed up by the function of the death. The death, not the resurrection, had exchange value. Jesus’s death was our substitution, not the resurrection. This death was in fact a meaning the world understood–it could deal with it and use it: an exchange with God through violence meant that violence still had a role. So then the resurrection becomes an afterthought, a remainder we are not sure what to do with, despite the fact that one part of the mystery of Christ’s act of redemption makes no structural sense without the other.

The resurrection is the culture of the New Testament in every sense.

The New Testament dwells within the Resurrection. It is unthinkable outside it. Every page, every word vibrates with its pivotal meaning. 

The resurrection of Jesus is a new language of human being. It is a definitively new point of reference in contradiction of the world. It is another fabric of being not dependent on scapegoating and victims.

That is why the early Christians were able to offer forgiveness and nonviolence without a second thought–because they had entered a totally new experience of being human.

It is essential to grasp this. We cannot stop being human beings by mere moral command. We cannot stop collectively scapegoating if our very humanity depends on it, which it does! The only way to stop is if there is a new collective basis of humanity revealed; if the revelation is sufficiently dramatic and shared to make a new community possible. This is resurrection. It is the in-breaking into history of indestructible forgiveness and nonviolence.

Now, with a political triumph of exclusion and othering, resurrection as the basis for new humanity has never been more crucial. The negative half of gospel anthropology–the disclosure of the victim–has taken the world by storm, and everyone now instinctively sides with the victim and claims to be the victim. It is time for the positive half–the resurrection humanity of love and forgiveness–to become equally well known. The whole world can learn this new thing (and in many ways is learning it). But it is surely down to those who claim to be church–Christian community–to show themselves as compelling examples.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that everyone who believes in him shall not be wiped out but have unbounded life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn it, but to save the world through him.”  

LOVE’S TIDE

October 17, 2016Poetry

If you were walking on the line

Of a vast and mighty strand

Where all the sea had fled away

And all you knew was sand

You might ask from where it was

These grains of rock took birth

And whence indeed th’uncanny wind

Which breathes of sea to earth

Then all at once as you walked

A tide came skipping on

A million million rivers flood

To lift the rocks with song

Then you saw those wastes of stone

For the shoreline that they were

The ancient ebb of an ocean deep

A Springtide long deferred

Even so the universe

And all worlds that may be

Feel within the deep defect of

Some long departed sea

Yet suddenly the rocks may spin

And sense their endless night

As both decoy and the deed

Of love hidden in plain sight

And all at once that love will rise

That long did hide its face–

For love will not be bargained for

But must know its own embrace–

And the sea, the sea, is running in

To arms held open wide

A million milion rivulets

Of love’s returning tide!