Saturday, September 19, 2009

Living in Atlantis

The old story of a city beneath the sea, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, fascinates everyone, me included. I’m very at home in the U.S. (Green Card in hand, the possibility next year of becoming a citizen) but of course I have strong memories of Europe, so I suppose my soul is somewhere between, like Atlantis. Not only that. I find that ancient fable to be a parable of our own time: a civilization alive but drowning. In the Greek version Atlantis was a military empire and was swallowed by a massive inundation in a night and a day. In the Hebrew Bible the sea is cosmic code for violence (think the Books of Jonah, Daniel). Putting those cultural clues together, Atlantis drowned in a tide of its own violence.

Humans are no more violent today than our ancestors. But we have accumulated the tools and images of killing to an unprecedented degree. We have devised a visual feast of violence in news, movies, computer generated images, video games. It’s something literally the world has never seen before. Violence is a 24/7 human percept. And that has a double effect. It makes our minds more accustomed to scenes of violence (what people sometimes call becoming desensitized) but also much more conscious of it as a theme in its own right. I just read a book, Hunger Games. It was tenth grade summer reading at my son's high school. It tells the story of a kind of reality TV in a post-apocalyptic era. What is striking is the brutal matter-of-fact way in which teenagers kill each other because they are ordered to and everybody expects it. There is hardly any compunction or moral conflict. And that’s clearly a reflection of the way people (especially young people) are used to seeing killing through the lens of TV, movies etc. It is not a moral question, but a perceptual one. It’s how we frame and feel our reality. Today we do it with enormous doses of imaged violence. On the other hand, because of this we are more and more aware of violence. People who read the book cannot help but think about it. It’s become something that is bigger than us, happening to us as a reality in its own right.

We live inside a giant permanent Coliseum games. But it’s obviously not just a game (no less than the original Coliseum was just games). Almost every week, and sometimes more than once a week, with sickening regularity, there is news of a group of people, a family, or simply random individuals, blown away by a man with a gun and a grudge. The plasma of violence—this thing in its own right—will grip an individual with uncontrollable power and he will pick up one of the guns lying around in our country like kitchenware and act out his fury. At the same time the U.S. exports a huge amount of violence to the rest of the world. I was recently hit by this statistic: two thirds of the arms sold in the world in 2008 were from the U.S., earning $37.8 billion. Again all this is not basically a moral question. It’s a human question, about how we structure our human life and in a way that comes round to destroying it, to wiping it out. If we were to imagine some final Atlantis style melt-down for our civilization it would make Plato’s strange folk memory/myth look like a cute fairy tale.

But that’s not the point of what I’m saying. This is not a scare piece. In fact it’s the opposite. The point of living in Atlantis is to learn to live underwater. All the stuff I just described is already happening so in so many ways we’re already right there. We’re swimming in the ocean of violence. For a Christian who understands this the reaction is not to seek even more violence—this time from an angry God who will come to punish all this evil. That is simply to see God in terms of the percept of violence which dominates the human eye. For a Christian it is rather a call to build the survivability of Atlantis within its moment of disaster. Because it’s only when the crisis builds to this level—when there is no middle way between the two alternatives—that a new humanity based in forgiveness as a way of life, as the true way of being human—not just an occasional “heroic” gesture—becomes apparent. It is in fact the moment of choice, the moment when the challenge of Christ begins to come home in an unavoidable way: either an entirely a new way of being human or the endless self-fueled crisis, either the pure eye of peace or the beam-in-the-eye of violence, either forgiveness or limitless recycling fire. Living in Atlantis therefore is enormously exciting and hopeful, the time when the Christian message can really come into its own.

As Jesus said, “the only sign that will be given you is the sign of Jonah,” a human being who could live under water.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Journey with Jesus #15

Sorry for the delay in posting this study from August. The Old Testament study that accompanies this one (Jesus and the smallest thing) will be posted in the next few weeks.
Wood Hath Hope will be interrupting it's "Journey with Jesus" to run a short two-week introduction to our Bible theology of non-violence. Our regular schedule will resume after this. Peace - Linda



New Testament - The smallest thing 08/06/09

In Luke 1:52 the Magnificat, Mary’s hymn of praise, announces the gospel’s concern for the small and weak. Mary proclaims that God has brought the powerful from their thrones and exalted the lowly. Again in Luke John the Baptist proclaims the overturning of the established order. He quotes from Isaiah 40: Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low.” High is low and vice versa.

Jesus’ parables are remarkable for their focus on small things. The parables are simple, to the point, and have the power to change your perspective. Matthew 13 is the great chapter for parables. In v.33 we have the parable of the yeast. The woman hides it in the dough. It is lost, no longer visible – and yet has the effect of causing the whole loaf of bread to rise. In v.44 another small thing is hidden – the treasure buried in a field, and in v.45. the small thing is a pearl of great price. These are all small, hidden things that once discovered shift your orientation. The world shifts and changes around you.

Perhaps the most well known “small thing” from the parables is the seed. The seed is a powerful image because it has a vitality and potency that produces newness and life. In Mt 13:31 Jesus uses the example of the mustard seed, “smallest of all the seeds.” This is the classic parable of the small thing that becomes the most important thing. In MK 4:26-29 another parable describes the seed growing secretly. The farmer does not need to do anything, does not even pay attention, yet the seed grows. In these parables Jesus shifts the established world logic that bigger is best.

In Luke 15:3-10 there are two parables of lost small things. The parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. Jesus recognizes the irrational amounts of time that we often spend in order to save the smallest coin (think coupon clipping, rebates). He taps into the human sense of having to find something that is lost; regardless of its intrinsic value it becomes the obscure object of desire. He translates these human foibles into a parable about the kingdom of God. That same feeling of joy that we have about finding something that has been lost is like the joy in heaven when one sinner repents. The parable of the lost sheep is highly counter- intuitive. The shepherd leaves the remaining ninety-nine sheep unprotected in order to search for the one lost sheep. Again there is joy when the lost is found. The parables tell us to pay attention to the small, lost, hidden element. This is where joy is.

In John 11: 49-50 Caiaphas, the High Priest, states that “it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed”. The Sanhedrin is trying to decide what to do about Jesus. Caiaphas’ position is that the Romans will use Jesus as an excuse to bring down violence on the people. This is a familiar theme in movies , cutting someone off to save the rest– e.g. the mountain climber who saves his friends by cutting the rope that connects him to them. This is also the human logic of war – we have to kill in order to preserve the peace. Eliminating the individual to maintain order is at the heart of sacrifice – a practice common to all traditional cultures. Jesus overturns this fundamental human logic. Sacrifice just perpetuates the cycle of violence. For change to take place the human heart needs to be transformed. We need to surrender our boxed-in way of thinking. Jesus says it is the single sacrificed thing that is important, not the crowd for which it is sacrificed. To think this way is to invert established human logic. And for Jesus to say this meant that he believed the things that box us in can be overcome, especially fear and fear of death which keep us in the old logic.

With Jesus the least and the last become first. Jesus shows us this in practice – he becomes that thing, the last, the least, the lost. He enters into the human process of sacrificing the weakest to save the nation. He says “see me, the hidden thing”. He asks us to pay attention to the least thing, the weakest thing and see its value. Salvation comes by transforming our established human logic. Jesus takes the process we use to save people (sacrifice) and turns it into something that really does save, by changing our whole viewpoint on reality.

In Lk 20:17-18 it is the stone that the builder rejected that becomes the corner stone. The stone is the rejected, the least, last, lost, the hidden –it is Jesus. But this little stone will destroy the kingdoms of this world. (A reference to the stone not cut by human hands which topples the king’s statue and becomes a mighty kingdom in Daniel 2:31-45.)

We are also ourselves the rejected thing that has been redeemed—whatever way in which he have been rendered small, disposable, Jesus makes this valuable. We have thus been given freedom and endless life because we are no longer defined by the world. Through Jesus we can turn away from selfishness and fear. This endless life is for all – God is not exclusive: he sends his rain on the just and unjust alike.