Sign Hunting With Jesus

When I was leaving the Roman Catholic priesthood my superiors—the people in charge--said I was emotionally too immature to get married. No less than ten years earlier these same guys ordained me a priest. Figure that one out. I’ve tried to, and in the process I’ve come up with this little bit of a personal reflection on the meaning of “church.”

I should be gracious. It was easy for those who were charged with discerning my vocation to make a mistake and give me the green light. I gave every sign of unreservedly seeking Christ in my life. So why not think this person “has a vocation.” But there, there, was the problem. A vocation in this thinking is an ontological thing, a stone dropped out of heaven so that it doesn’t matter what kind of state you’re in emotionally or spiritually, so long as you’ve got it you’re good. Yes, I know, seminaries etc. have tightened up their procedures a lot, producing the correct psychological grid to measure the ontological thing. These days with proper testing I would probably not have got through (perhaps, so hold that thought for a moment.) Meanwhile, although generally the seminaries may be more careful, narrowing the human slipper to guage the heavenly foot, the essential thinking—precisely—has not changed. Certain select males have vocations. God drops it on them. Forget the richness of human existence. That’s it.

Back to the perhaps of me not getting through. My superiors didn’t see my radical alienation. The church always encouraged something like that, a degree of alienation—flight from the world, as it was called—so on most days I’m sure I looked pretty good to them. At the same time, as an institution the church was/is deeply worldly. It’s lived in collusion with armies and governments since the fourth century, and sometimes you just have to take your hat off to it for doing such an incredible job of defining itself against the world and surviving very much in it. One of the things that used to get to me about this murky deal was the nukes, i.e. nuclear weapons and their real ability to destroy the planet, all that “good” stuff that God had made back in Genesis 1. The bishops said it would be wrong ever to drop the bomb, but not to use it for “deterrence,” i.e. to threaten to drop it. Another one of those having-it-both-ways that takes some figuring out. The come-back to my kind of criticism of this was: “Well what would you do if the Nazis (or the Soviets) were taking over?” My inclination was always to answer “Whatever.” Not because I think it’s fine to do nothing about the Nazis but because I think the question is disingenuous, just finding the latest pretext for business as usual.

Whatever.

It wasn’t just the nukes. My alienation went deeper than that. And here we’re really beginning to talk, I mean about “church.” Ultimately it was the positive content that seemed to be missing. I was looking for meaning, significance, and the whole complex of signs to which I had originally committed myself was fading faster than Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel on a summer’s day with a million tourists popping flash bulbs at it. It’s the signs that count. Intellectually I understood what was intended and basically believed the package. But the signs by which it all was communicated, i.e. the lived semiotics which people could see and say “ah yes, I know what that this is about,” it was this that was eroding. It was all two dimensional, like the world had become paper thin. I was inside a room with nothing outside it, and progressively the inside was collapsing too so that all that was left was a single molecular surface with the traces of an image on it, and that was evaporating same as everything else. Pretty soon there would be nothing but airless flat extension, and madness. I had to punch a hole into life and get out.

Outside “in the real world” the signs of Christ were completely absent, or so it seemed at first. The world was thick with its own signs, with survival, sex, work, politics. My first job with homeless people made survival top of the list, the main meaning. I would look across the Mile End Road after my shift in a halfway-house for traumatized, alcoholic men. I would stare at the chain-link fence guarding vacant lots, the faded Edwardian houses, and my own thoughts of those unhappy volatile people. But there was no Christ, just survival and work. Later I got married, and later still we came to the U.S.

Ah, the good ol’ U.S. Here I was dumped headfirst in a world of signs. Britain had advertizing and T.V., but nothing like the endless highway of billboards and signs, the riot of channels and stations, the relentless competition to get yourself noticed and be significant in other people’s eyes that happens here. A semiotic frenzy. Here it’s not just survival, sex, work etc., the sign has achieved an existence in its own right, the famous “fifteen minutes of fame.” But now here came the twist: at the heart of American semiotics something both terrifying and wonderful was happening. The sign of Christ I was desperately looking for all those years ago was slowly revealing itself

I attended church here. It has a different meaning than in Britain. U.S. Christianity is itself a mode of survival. It takes place within the maelstrom of competition as a place of reprieve and affirmation from where you can gather yourself one more time to enter the fray. In Britain and Europe generally people don’t go to church half so much because they don’t feel nearly as exposed and in need of divine affirmation. Alongside church, however, there is one other significant mode of affirmation that Americans make use of--the gun. It is of course incredibly scary where people combine these two together and have both Jesus and guns as spiritual props, but we can’t go down that road just now. (But, for reference, check out a book called Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant, a raucous read but too true for comfort.)

The meaning of the gun in U.S. culture was brought home to me a couple of months back when I had a tradesman working in our house and it turned out he was carrying a loaded 45. He was a nice guy, talkative and well-read. It was very unlikely he would use the weapon—he said he had it for protection against pit bulls—but it was clear for him to be able to carry the gun meant a lot. It was a potent sign for him, pressed there against the side of his body. It meant he was strong against all-comers. Here in the North East, since Obama got into office, applications for gun permits have gone up over 50% and it’s probably true all across the country. People say it’s because they’re scared the man with the funny name will bring in sweeping gun-control legislation. But I think it’s much more basically a matter of self-affirmation when the riot of signs says generally we’re not doing so well. The gun is the semiotics of last recourse here in the U.S. It is individual divine sanction when there are no kings or priests to provide it collectively. It is sure and certain transcendence within a second’s reach.

Which brings me back to what I’ve been talking about all along this circuitous narrative. As I said, I attended church here in the U.S., partly initially for our children, and partly because I sensed the slightly more edgy role of the church, standing in this weird symbiosis of sign-giving with a sign-ridden culture. In other words, churches were more about providing meaning in the midst of chaos than keeping together a metaphysical world order. However, there was still plenty of that, and the church’s signs remained existentially shallow at a more or less terminal level. But at length—and here finally is the real point—in the slow years of experience I have understood the sign of Christ as coming to greater and greater clarity and visibility precisely as a true and radical alternative to the gun. If you want Christian meaning then observe the crisis of violence all around and then see Jesus as its true and generative other way. And this is not in my head, in the way I intellectually grasped Christian meaning back when I was a priest. No, this is something rising concretely in the world, like blossom on a Spring morning.

How do I know? Well, it’s what I’ve been telling you! Everything in my life has been a sensitivity to the absence or presence of meaningful signs. The sign system of the Roman Catholic priesthood was evacuated for me as surely as if someone has placed a vacuum cleaner at the door and sucked everything out of it. I then embarked on a twenty year pilgrimage looking for where those signs might have landed in the world. And now I know. For me at least, it’s here in the U.S. over against the growing and growling crisis of violence all around us. Exactly over against it. It’s not focusing on life hereafter, or justification, or moral rightness, anything like that. It’s the astonishing, wonderful, loving, creative, restorative, life-giving and forgiving new humanity of Jesus in the midst of a world where humanity is an endangered species. Closer even than the cold pistol with its ten shells filled with hurt lying to that guy's heart the Risen One from the long-empty tomb stands between the world and all its death.

This sign, or set of signs, has a thickness to it that speaks to me every time I turn on the Internet or open the bible or speak to a neighbor. And I cannot be happy in any church situation that does not fully release this meaning, that plays instead to some fuzzy inherited Greek version of Jesus’ message to keep everything ticking along. In fact I have doubts as to whether the actual physical architecture of the churches (their primary pre-reflective sign system), compromised as they are by about 1500 years of metaphysical doctrine as opposed to anthropological restoration, are able to communicate this new humanity. But more on this another time.

Tony Bartlett