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.