Friday, July 24, 2009

Gucci and the Grace of God

What happens to the snorkeling business when humans grow gills? What happens to the village translator when the people learn the foreigners’ language? What happens to the Christian church when the world is catastrophically infected by the gospel?

These are questions which arise from my last few blogs. They are perhaps fantastic questions, unheard of questions, but they do really make sense. First, they make scriptural sense. In John’s gospel Jesus says the Holy Spirit will “prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment,”(16.8) meaning, yes, the Holy Spirit is making a continual argument to the world about the most basic human issues and the world cannot help but begin to see things the Holy Spirit’s way. Moreover, based on the epochal insights of Rene Girard I have given account of how the argument might actually go, showing that the major contemporary themes of freedom and desire and, along with them, compassion for the victim are trace elements of the Jesus story settling in the minds and values of humanity. Then I also said that these filtered elements of the gospel are enough to set the world spinning wildly out of control. Without the full conversion of love these things are only enough to make the human system mad with itself rather than fully transformed. That’s why the world is “catastrophically” infected by the gospel. At the same time “catastrophe” can also mean just a huge contrariwise movement, and that could yet mean that the world will adopt the full and true movement of the gospel. I say this in faith fully aware that facts on the ground might seem to contradict this possibility. No matter the desperate facts I still believe the Master of the gospel will have the final victory. Jesus says, “Have courage, I have overcome the world” (John 16.33); and this does not mean in a violent, beat-down-your-enemy kind of way—how could Jesus mean that?—but by unrelenting Holy Spirit truth-telling to the human situation.

Which brings me back to the snorkeling business. If the scenario just painted is only half true it’s got to mean something enormous for the traditional business of doing church. Why would the churches want to sell snorkeling equipment, perpetuating the condition of two worlds, one up above where the perfect spiritual air is and one below where we briefly live? Why would they do this if the world below is filled with Holy Spirit and, more and more, humanity is mutating to breathing Spirit in this actual world system? Why would they continue to speak of a heavenly other-world when, as Jesus taught, the sign of the gospel is the sign of Jonah, of God’s ability to bring life in the violent human depths of this world? And, most of all, how can the churches stay in the business of snorkeling when the gospel is getting people to grow adaptive gills and yet, at the same time, they are swept by catastrophic storms because the same people do not know how truly to breathe the Spirit in their depths? Is it not high time for the churches to accept their mission is teaching the transformed humanity of the gospel, rather than the alienated humanity that has been default up to now?

If the churches took this seriously there are many ways that it might play out, but the first and most important, I think, is a new sense of mysticism. What is needed is a mysticism of Christ’s presence in this world in order to affirm clearly and powerfully the ultimate reference of meaning given us by the gospel, rather than a hand-me-down Greek other-world. If Jesus is risen bodily that means he is still part of this human world but in the transformed state he is calling the rest of us to. Don’t be put off by the word mysticism. I don’t mean the old-fashioned perception of mysticism, something highly esoteric, because, naturally, other-worldly. I’m talking about the concrete and real sense of Christ in the world in the way I’ve been presenting. Mysticism means a direct connection with the divine, but even in the other-worldly sense of the divine that still has to come in the flesh and blood and thoughts of the saint. What I am saying is that now our human flesh and blood and thoughts are more and more affected and transfigured by the gospel and that is where we find Christ. Yes, I know that there is a tremendous amount wrong with our flesh and blood and thoughts—there is the self-destructive path of chaotic freedom and desire. But I am also saying that there at the bottom of this dangerously spinning human universe is the serene communion of love—the still point of the moving world, except it is only still in the sense of peace, but full of the vibrant movement of self-giving. This mysticism means that God is absolutely present to our cultural world as divine “self-othering” (the giving of the self to the other) fully manifest in Jesus and more and more manifest at the base of our crazed freedom as its true source. Of our crazed desire as its true desire. Of our offended victims as their resurrection through compassion and forgiveness.

Let me try one example: take a top brand advert, a Calvin Klein or Gucci, something completely “worldly” like that. It is bound to deliver an overwhelming presence of body, youth, sexuality. Obviously this advert is able to infect most people with its powerful immediacy, filling us with desire, making us want the product on display. The overbrimming sense is fraught with danger in its prompting of boundless desire. Yet at the same time the naked intensity unleashed by the advert reveals the immensity of love at work in the world which makes the intolerable display tolerable, which somehow gives it innocence and truth. Something made up purely of possessive desire without also a positive goodness would be socially untenable. I would say, therefore, behind every such display in our hyper-visual world is the image of the Crucified, making possible a universal release of desire, unbounded by exclusions of any sort (class, wealth etc.), because it communicates to the world a universal good. Of course—and again and again this has to be repeated—it is all deeply ambivalent. But this is precisely what is experienced as the fun, the thrill, the energy of our contemporary global culture. The whole of the postmodern world is a kind of Pompeii with Vesuvius poised above it, but now, in contrast, below it is the new creation of Christ. Christ is the mother giving birth to our cultural universe, over and over again, as limitless self-giving. If Christians can see this, can see Christ not as a distant metaphysical figure but as the engine of our actual experienced world, they can be energized to preach the gospel and with cutting-edge truth. Instead of the insatiable greed and cruelty at the surface of contemporary desire there is the love of God waiting to break through below and in it. This is not a God above, separate, alien to our world, but absolutely involved, up to her neck in our affairs, waiting for us just to see and surrender to her incredible birthing love.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Radioactive Christianity

My last post was deep and I think the only way out is to get in deeper still. I find myself in these two blogs presenting something of a programmatic argument. I didn’t really start out intending to, but now I’m in it up to my neck I must, as Doris said, “Just keep swimming.” So, please, continue to swim with me!

Last time I argued for the Christian sources of freedom, capitalism and romanticism. I did this in a positive sense, as the emergence of a gospel-based desire for the things of this earth. I did also point to what I called the dark side, the obvious respect of how destructive unbounded freedom and desire can be. Now, for some people that would be a pure “Oh Yeah??” because “The Christian sources of capitalism” would not represent simply a redundant statement but a sick joke too. They would say there is something systemic in Christianity which is destructive of the earth, and this would then turn my original proposition on its head: gospel-based desire rather than creating a positive relation to the earth creates an intensely destructive one. So here is a further, trickier aspect to the whole question and I need to follow where it goes. I must do so in order to understand more deeply the false Christianization of the world, including, in the scope of this phrase, official Christianity too.

A recent article in an online news service called truthout.org described the plight of indigenous peoples across the globe under pressure from the West. One particular example was arresting because a successful Christian-based feature movie has recently been made about them. They are the Huaorani, a tribe of hunters and gatherers inhabiting the rainforests at the headwaters of the Amazon. Numbering about 3000 they had no contact from the outside world until as recently as the late 1950's.

A leader by name of Moi Enomenga describes the situation provoked by a western oil company in their area: "First they drill, then they extract oil, then there is a highway, then there is colonization, then there are so many problems, because, here, the forest is clean, but when the companies enter, they destroy so much. The people don't have what they need to live, because the Americans don't respect much, because they take the oil, instead of letting us live. This is why the Huaorani ask for the oil-drilling to stop."

Encroachment by the oil industry took place in the last two decades. The original contact in the nineteen fifties was through Christian missionaries and, according to Enomenga, it was members of the Huaorani who had been taken away and educated at missionary schools who were bribed to facilitate the deal with the oil company. Ergo, missionaries are spies for the big companies and converts are their stooges.

As I say, all this was of intense interest because the Huaorani people and the initial group of missionaries were the subject of an effective mass-distribution film called “End of the Spear” (2006)—in fact we watched this movie on one of our WHH movie nights. The film told the story of the killing of five males from the missionary group and their nonretaliatory deaths. Subsequently it was the response of the wives caring for the people in the midst of a polio epidemic which seemed to have brought many to Christian conversion. The absolutely central theme of the movie was the gospel principle of nonviolence. The motivating factor driving the missionaries—in particular a central figure, a small-plane pilot with the providential name of Nate Saint—was the relentless cycle of warrior revenge among the Huaorani, which was driving them to extinction. Some time after the killings a Christian translator is asked by one of the tribe why the Christian missionaries (including Nate) did not use their guns when attacked. She replied, invoking the name for the tribal high god, Weangongi. She said the missionaries came to tell the Huaorani “that Waengongi has a Son. He was speared and didn't spear back, so that others would live well." Released in the wake of 9/11 retaliatory wars the movie seemed to me to have a powerful self-critical aspect. If this was the message of Christian missionaries from North America evangelizing a tribe of indigenous peoples, what should that mean for people in North America who called themselves Christian? The movie therefore seemed to me part of the steadily emerging alternative language of Christianity , which seems to come contextually, from a world subliminally informed by the gospel message, including popular culture, rather than formal doctrine. This idea is in fact at the basis of all my blogs, but especially the last two and this one. But let’s return for a moment to the Huaorani.

Here is Enomenga’s quite different assessment of the same events. "Twenty-five years ago, we were still living free. We didn't have borders. Our territory went from Peru into Ecuador. My father and grandfather always defended our territory … they guarded it very well. Nobody came inside. If people disrespected our laws and came to hunt on our territory, they would get killed. In 1957, American missionaries, five of them, showed up at the village of my grandfather on my mother's side. Those five missionaries were killed there. I always thought about this when my mother and father would tell me their stories. I thought when I turned twenty-five I would then defend my land. After the five missionaries were killed, more came and said we would be bombed if we didn't move. So they took us away from our communities and moved us to one area. Today there is a community where the missionaries took everybody. I always thought that this kind of thinking can't be permitted on our land. My father and grandfather defended our territory by killing. Now I have to defend our territory by making friends with people and organizing.”

Enomenga’s comments actually corroborate my overall argument of an alternative contextual language of Christianity. He says he can now have an impact by making friends and organizing, rather than killing. But this possibility has to be provided by forces prepared to listen to him, people who want to become his friends, who have a concern for the environment and for native peoples. These attitudes must be counted an oblique or refracted form of the gospel—i.e. contextual concern for the victim provoked by the gospel story and its crucified prophet, the man from Nazareth. What other historical-ethical figure could possibly give global political status to 3000 tribal people lost at the headwaters of the Amazon? At the same time it is small immediate comfort to Enomenga, and to many others in the world, when the natural environment in which they live is being raped and destroyed.

Enomenga then adds another aspect which is even more challenging.

"About 50 years ago, colonists came here, and brought diseases, and an enormous number of Huaorani died. This is why the Huaorani don't want them here in Ecuador. Here, we have a lot of history, stories about how the planet was born, how the Huaorani lived.... I would teach them about this, but they come here to educate us, but I don't want them to. The missionaries lie. I don't believe them. I believe in our own spirituality here: the forest."

The question is truly, do missionaries lie? In the movie when the explanation is given “He didn't spear back, so that others would live well” I don’t think they lied. I think they spoke bedrock gospel truth: that Jesus effected a radical shift in human being through profound nonretaliation. But what about the whole metaphysics in which a statement like this is usually embedded: of eternal salvation in another heavenly place, of a disembodied spiritual self that belongs there, of Jesus’ payment of a debt of sin, of faith as the prize lottery ticket to this other world, of resurrection of the body as a confusing and redundant afterthought? I think this is the highly fraught Christian religion and spirituality implied by Enomenga, a spirituality that goes along with the destruction of his forest, and over against which he prefers his own. His own, I’m sure, would have the forest as a place alive with meaning and associations, with stories of ancestors, of gods, of animals, of dread and blessing. It is the immediacy of the divine or the transcendent to the lived world that he was talking about, not a spirituality that displaces us to some nebulous space halfway between death and an invisible planet in the sky.

At any rate this alienated Christianity spirituality provides a very powerful counterthrust to a claim of positive Christian desire in the earth. It would in fact lead some people to say that the very idea is hogwash and Christian desire is almost always negative in the earth. It is because of this that the central structure of my argument here—and everywhere—is that there are in fact two very different Christianities. I have the courage to say this because I think these two are already separating themselves out before our eyes. There is the formal-doctrinal, most-often-preached variety with its default metaphysics of a heavenly hereafter, and there is the contextual, subliminal, infectious, historical and anthropological variety. The latter is the apparently unintended but true consequence of the gospel. It’s as if the gospel is a form of radioactivity, used formally for one set of purposes—we might say it’s locked up in the nuclear reactors of the churches for the sake of its power—but in the meantime it continues to render everything around it luminous and alive with positive desire, nonviolence, and compassion for the victim.

It all comes down finally to desire, to its highly fluid or volatile character. And I have briefly to state this in an analytic way to make everything plain. We all know desire can be destructive and violent whoever and wherever you are. There is conflictive desire in the rainforest just as much as in the salons of Paris or the streets of New York: nobody disputes the cycle of intense warrior revenge among the Huaorani. Desire is conflictive because it is mediated, because it springs from a relationship to the object in which a third party models for me that relationship.

Neuroscientists have recently discovered that even monkeys become very highly interested in an object when it is grasped or held by another monkey or by a human. Under these circumstances it is almost inevitable that the person who models to me the value of an object is going to become my rival, my enemy. I want precisely what he wants. In this light religion and spirituality can be broadly characterized as a means to control desire through sanctions and threats of punishment (religion) and as a creative mediation of a positive or nonconflictive relationship to the object (spirituality). But Christ is the only figure of mediation who seeks proactively to overcome all human violence in relationship, through forgiveness and love, and therefore ultimately to turn all religion into spirituality. The love and forgiveness demonstrated by Jesus renders religion redundant and makes the whole of life potentially constituted by intense spirituality. Here then finally is the secret of the truly enormous liberating effect of the Christian message. In Christ, at least in principle, all desire becomes good because all violence is transformed into love. In a world shaped by Jesus the world is literally everyone’s oyster!

This, as I say, is the final root of the enormous dynamic of Western culture. It is the root of the contextual, infectious radioactivity of the gospel, proclaiming first that all earthly objects are good, and then, more radically, inviting compassion for the victim and demonstrating through any number of ways, including movies, the path of nonviolence. What Christians have yet to do is catch up with their own dynamic spirituality. For, in this light, it is possible to understand historical Christian religion as an unhealthy hybrid of violence, metaphysics and Jesus, but today that hybrid is separating out progressively into its component parts. In Christ it is possible to have a mediation that gives us a relationship to every object filled with love, and this makes religion redundant and “the way” of Jesus truly everything.

The past Christian relationship with the earth has been an unhappy marriage of positive desire and restless alienation, leading to the typical smash and grab capitalism which is wrecking the planet, while promoting an other-worldly spirituality which says essentially “what the heck, we’re going to heaven anyway!” But now in the radioactive light of a new emerging Christianity I would say that in every berry on every tree there is God because of Christ. In every bird and every stream. And not just in the natural world. In every glass of Pinot Noir or Glenlivet or lemonade, in every fresh loaf of bread, in every chocolate ganache, in every pizza and dish of pasta, in every quesadilla and rich taco. And not just at the gastronomic level. In every shirt in the store, in every sweater and pair of pants, in every tube of toothpaste, in every perfume by Christian Dior, in every Toyota and Ford, in every Apple computer, in every Ipod, Christ is waiting to be seen. This is because true desire for them is authentically mediated by Christ. In Christ, and only in him, I can want all these things not for myself but truly for you—and by implication also for myself, as another you loved by Christ! I can truly desire them, for the sake of the great “You” of love which he announced in the world. So long as I begin to relate to a Christ-irradiated universe this kind of talk is not cheap grace. It means that the concrete human space is really filled with the endless nonviolence of Jesus. This is what makes it possible--that Jesus “did not spear back" and I know this in the depth of my soul. Because of Jesus everything is liberated for love. My brother, Enomenga, you, like the rest of us, are already half-Christianized, by radioactive Christianity. I hope you, and all of us, will live to see and know a full and deep Christianity by the progression of this astonishing radioactivity throughout our human community.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Journey with Jesus #13

New Testament - Mountain 07/02/09

Here is the summary of last week's study aka Jesus and God and a big thing - Peace, Linda

Mountains are big, evident, and they fascinate people –we see a mountain and want to scale its heights. Edmund Hillary when asked why he climbed Everest famously replied “Because it’s there.” Mountains are supremely physical objects and the message of Jesus is deeply rooted in the world of things. Religion tends to be about getting out of here – leaving this world behind. The contemporary thought of “spirituality” has more of an intrinsic connection to the world. Jesus’ message is rather a “this-worldly spirituality” than a religion in this sense. The Bible— both in the preaching of the prophets and in Jesus – says that the world’s realm of life can achieve fullness in itself, instead of just redemption for an other-worldly soul. Endless, abundant life comes from overcoming violence, murder, destruction and death in all its forms.

Mountains are symbols of transcendence. In ancient mythologies gods lived on the mountain (for example Olympus). They are places that are easily defended, associated with superiority, power and authority. It was to a mountain top that Satan brought Jesus in the third temptation (Matthew)–offering him authority over all the nations if he would fall down and worship him. Mountains are the high ground, a place to look up to and close to heaven. This pre-modern world view still dominates religious thinking. In a scientific worldview space has no up and to say heaven is “up” is meaningless.

The Synoptic Gospels (Mathew, Mark and Luke) share a mountain story – the Transfiguration. In Mark’s account (Mk8:31-9:8) Jesus is transfigured so that his clothes became dazzling. In Matthew his face shines like the sun (17.2). This is noteworthy in that after his resurrection Jesus does not dazzle. In fact he is so undazzling that he is not even clearly recognized. So why at this point in his account does Mark describe such a scene? The answer lies in the context of the story. Jesus (at the height of his popularity) has just announced, for the first time, his decision to go to Jerusalem where he will be arrested, suffer and die. The gospel will repeat this announcement two more times. The transfiguration is a literary affirmation. Mark is “throwing a bone” to his readers to keep their attention and sense of assurance—that ultimately things are going to work out. The words of the Father “this is my Son, the Beloved” recall Jesus’ baptism and remind the reader that he has unique status before God. The literary function of the transfiguration does not mean that Jesus did not pray on a mountaintop, nor that he did not have ecstatic experience witnessed and even somehow shared by the apostles. What it does tell us is to beware of the default association of God with the vertical, the heavens etc. etc.

The journey back down the mountain underlines this by providing a powerful counterpoint to the mountaintop, foreshadowing the central meaning of the crucifixion to come. Jesus has a discussion about Elijah and the Elijah-figure of John the Baptist who was mistreated and killed—he is thereby the forerunner of Jesus’ own passion. There follows then in verse 14-29 a healing in which the crowd has a dramatic role as well as the scribes. The boy is healed of an evil spirit which convulses him and seeks “to destroy him.” Jesus is immersed in the same forces that will bring about his death. In this sense the mountaintop is immediately plunged into the abyss of violence.

In Mk 11:12-25, after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus retreats to Bethany. The next day he returns to the city and disrupts the business of the temple—he drives out the sellers and buyers of animals, overturns the money tables, and the seats of the dove-sellers, and stops all traffic of materials. Bracketing this account of Jesus’ attack on the temple’s sacrificial function is the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree. It is not the season for figs and the tree does not have any fruit to feed his hunger, so Jesus curses the tree. On their return to Bethany the disciples see the withered tree and question Jesus about it. He replies:

“Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘be taken up and be thrown into the sea’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours. Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses”

The literary inclusion – the fig tree story – gives the meaning to its contents, to what lies within its brackets, i.e. the temple action. Like the fig tree the temple is out of season and does not bear fruit. It is not a house of prayer. Instead it has become a den of bandits/killers – the same word used for Barabbas, a person who engages in violent revolution (John 18:40, Lk: 23.19). The temple was not just the center of Jewish worship. Isaiah 2:2-3 describes the mountain of the Lord, Mount Zion, as the highest, the supreme point of the whole world. Mount Zion (Temple Mount) was a place of enormous political-religious significance. It was the one place where the Romans did not enter and so was the heart of Jewish resistance. Jesus understands that this violent mindset, this violent religion, is leading to an inevitable crisis of destruction. The Temple is going down. History shows us that within two score years of Jesus’ death, the Temple was completely destroyed by the Romans in reprisal for the Jewish uprising. The Temple was the last stand of the Jewish forces, and the Wailing Wall—part of the Temple’s foundations—is all that remains today.

In v.25 Jesus says that forgiveness, not sacrifice, is all that is needed to enter into a relationship with the Father. When he says “if you say to this mountain, ‘be taken up and be thrown into the sea’…it will be done for you,” he was not talking of some arbitrary act of supernatural power. Very likely he was looking at the actual Temple Mount, the focus of the Isaiah prophesy, when he said this. He says in effect if you have faith—i.e. relationship with him and his gospel—the temple mount can be thrown in to the sea – the place of chaos and primordial creation: a place of radical starting-over. Jesus points instead to forgiveness as the way to enter into relationship with the Father. He calls us to have the faith to surrender our temples, the institutional structures in which we place our security and our enduring violence, and receive the life we are searching for in prayer and in forgiveness.