Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Of Pears, Peers, Spit and Tears

Jim Warren, my Christian magician friend, sent me a piece he’d written, on a passage in Augustine’s Confessions. He’s commenting on the famous episode where the coming giant of Western theology is telling how as a sixteen-year-old, he once robbed a pear orchard. From the vantage point of his now forty-plus years and evolving Christian consciousness, Augustine is musing painfully on why and how this shameful act was possible. He did not do it for the pleasure of eating the pears for, as he says, he threw most of the “enormous quantity” to the pigs. The picture he paints is rather of a gang of boys spurring each other on and, as Jim relates it, clearly an instance of the power of mimetic or imitative desire. Here is a key passage which Jim quotes:

It is true that if the pears which I stole had been to my taste, and if I had wanted to get them for myself, I might have committed the crime on my own…(and) I should have had no need to kindle my glowing desire by rubbing shoulders with a gang of accomplices. But as it was not the fruit that gave me pleasure, I must have got it from the crime itself, from the thrill of having partners in sin. (II.8) Jim then comments: “So Augustine penetrates to a much more profound level of insight than the typical romantic idea that the thief steals because of the intrinsic desirability of the object. Desire was certainly at work, but in a way different from how we typically frame it. He describes himself possessed that night by a “glowing desire,” kindled from “rubbing shoulders with a gang of accomplices.” (II.9) The image is one of kindling a fire by the friction of rubbing wood against wood. The desire thus kindled does not have an independent existence; it does not originate within Augustine himself, in isolation, as a function of his relation to the pears. Rather, this desire springs into being as a function of his relation to his cohorts.”

In other words, it’s not the pears but the peers… Jim says that Augustine’s psychological analysis brought him very near to the insights of Rene Girard about the imitative character of desire, including its frequently violent outcome, as in the theft and destruction of a harvest of pears. What then struck me was the following. 1) Yes, Augustine has incredible powers of introspection and is right on the track of mimetic desire, and 2) he completely misses it as a structural principle! The reason he was so close to this anthropological principle and yet did not identify it is because he subsumes the whole thing within the Platonic metaphysics of the immortal soul and a doctrine of original sin. And this led me in turn to reflect on how profoundly the whole Augustinian framework has affected Christianity and how it is now at last all changing. I can’t believe how plain it all now seems, and I hope I can make it just as plain in the next couple of paragraphs!

Augustine is one heck of a smart guy. He is called by his contemporary Jerome (the same Jerome who translated the Greek bible into Latin) “the founder anew of the ancient faith” (Epistola 195). When I first came across this remark I thought it outrageous but I feel now it was no exaggeration. The first thing you need to know about Augustine is that he was a rhetorician, the most brilliant of his generation (and perhaps a thousand years after that as well). Today we would be more likely to call him a writer (his literary output was truly amazing) because he is so absolutely good with words, phrases and composition. So, thinking about Jerome’s remark, the first flag is that he is the producer of texts and a complete master of his craft.

Secondly if you read the Confessions you will see that Augustine’s path to conversion to Christianity came via a prior conversion to Neoplatonism (actually he calls it Platonism and in terms of the basic derivation of the philosophical viewpoint he is correct). Without going into any kind of detail—which is unnecessary because we are all so profoundly affected by the spirit of Platonic thought—we may say that what Augustine got from Plato was the intellectual conviction of a heavenly otherworld made available by the immortal intellectual soul which carries in itself the light of that world. Here he is, talking about his encounter with “the books of the Platonists”: These books served to remind me to return to my own self. Under your guidance I entered into the depths of my soul… I entered, and with the eyes of my soul, such as it was, I saw the Light that never changes casting its rays over the same eye of the soul, over my mind…. What I saw was something quite, quite different from any light we know on earth. It shone above my mind…. It was above me because it was itself the Light that makes me, and I was below because I was made by it. All who know the truth know this Light, and all who know this Light know eternity. It is the light that charity knows. (vii, 10)

Cutting to the chase, I would say that what Augustine is doing here, and throughout the Confessions, is constructing the Christian God out of Platonic thought, just as Plato constructed the true otherworld out of the intellectual soul and the death of the body. Plato goes round and round in a circle from innate ideas (like math) to the immortal soul which remembers them, to the return to the heavenly realm by the soul after death of the body. It’s very important to underline that effective construction of any circle of thought involves the casting out or elimination of the element that disturbs it—in Plato’s case the body. Deconstruction in its contemporary sense is the path of reflection which brings to light the cast out or eliminated element in the construction of any circle of thought. In Augustine’s case what is cast out—on top of Plato’s casting out of the body—is historical or earthly salvation, the very thing that the gospel proclamation of God’s kingdom seems to be urgently proposing! And so Augustine crossed a line, refounding Christianity on eternal principles derived from human cultural violence, i.e. the casting out of something (the body and the earth). Ever since Christians have gone round and round in an eternal circle, from the God beyond this world, to the soul intended to live with this God, to the almost complete devaluing of the earth and history, and back again to the God beyond.

It is true of course that Augustine is too much of a Christian and biblical scholar to get rid of history and historical salvation completely. When he’s commenting on the books of the Platonists he says he learnt so much about God and the Son of God in them, but he also says that what he didn’t learn of was Christ’s self-emptying and his redemptive death and the coming of charity or love by these means. (vii, 9 & 20) Nevertheless, these elements are included at a subordinate rhetorical moment after he’s laid out what he’s learned from the books, and so the essential framework is maintained. He even says: If I had not come across these books until after I had been formed in the mould of your Holy Scriptures and had learnt to love you through familiarity with them, the Platonist teaching might have swept me away from my foothold on the solid ground of piety, and even if I had held firm to the spirit in which the Scriptures had imbued me for salvation, I might have thought it possible for a man who read nothing but the Platonist books to derive the same spirit from them alone. (vii 20) In other words the final intellectual and aesthetic reference remains these books and nothing he has learned in the scriptures has provided an alternative intellectual principle. Later in his career Augustine did add what he considered a biblical notion to his thought of God—predestination of souls for heaven or hell. But this simply made things worse. By adding historical initiative to an eternal concept—a changeless divine will beyond the world—he ended up with the absolute inverse of a God of history: a God who has made up his mind for ever and always about the saved and the damned and nothing on earth—including the incarnation of the Word itself—will make any difference. In other words the casting out of history is even more absolute, and the construction of the dogmatic circle ever more fixed.

But now—and this is where all this has been leading—we have the emergence of an intellectual framework not borrowed from Plato, one arising directly from the scriptures themselves, and able to provide a rigorous meaning related directly to humanity and its history. This is what Jim was talking about, what Augustine guessed but then saw in terms only of the soul and original sin. Through the work of Rene Girard we are beginning to see that imitative or mimetic desire is not just a chaotic effect of some mythic sin by our first parents but it is the principle itself of humanity. It is what produces human beings, through their intense ability to imitate, through the violence and group victims this produces, and through the consequent birth of ritual, language and law: the emergence of human culture. But then, and of astonishing importance, it is the bible which is the singular narrative which has revealed all this to a self-deceiving world and at the very same time the possibility of a new human way. Deconstruction itself has to be part of this pulling away of the veils and it means we are now in a completely new situation.

What, therefore, is the goal toward which the gospel is leading, if not a new anthropology, a new way of being human? Rather than the immortal soul as the final point of reference we have a new humanity of love, shown us in Jesus, rising up against the world of violence and beyond all deconstruction because it does not exclude or eliminate anything. All this of course demands a whole lot more treatment, but let me give a quick illustration of what I’m saying. Instead of an eternal principle somewhere off the earth we are offered a new anthropological principle very much on the earth, the dramatically new humanity of Jesus.

In recent bible studies we have been reading the gospel of John and in that context I was struck by the mention of bodily fluids! Nothing in John’s gospel is there by accident. It all has a sign value or what also might be called the character of a signal. It’s meant to lead you deeper into the new thing that is so hard to sense at first. If the gospel talks about Jesus’ spit mixed with mud (9:6) or about his tears (11:35) these are signals to lead us deeper into Jesus’ new humanity. They are not there just to satisfy curiosity. And what is this humanity? It is the absolute handing over his self, his body, to others in love. Spit and tears join with the water and the blood which flow out at 19:34. They are all signals of endless self-giving, of expenditure without reserve, and it is endless or without reserve both at the moral level of Jesus’ character and person, and at the ontological level of how this character and person are raised up as deathless after they have given themselves to the last. In other words, spit and tears become grace: a grace lodged within spit and tears, as spit and tears, not as some ethereal, otherworldly immortal soul. Or, to carry the deconstruction all the way (and in admittedly a challenging image), the only immortal soul we now know is spit and tears condensed, evaporated and raised up for ever, as love.

Tony

Monday, July 19, 2010

John # 9

Here is the latest Bible Study in our series on John's Gospel.
Peace, Linda

As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written that you may believe: Encountering Jesus in the fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.

Background reading to study # 9- Written that you may believe, chapter 9.

The Gospel of John #9 – The man born blind 07/15/10

The story of the healing of the man born blind in John chapter 9 is probably a Johannine literary creation. It draws from stories of Jesus’ healing ministry (like the one found at Mk 8:22ff.) but, because the account is so highly constructed, it is unlikely to have been an identifiable event in Jesus’ life. It does have a vividness however that makes it seem authentic if not actually historical. John has given the story many layers of meaning and it tells something true on each of these levels.

For example, the “cast of characters” is highly significant. Each character represents a group affecting the Johannine community @ 90CE. The man born blind is “everychristian”, i.e. those in John’s community, who began in the dark, were brought into the light, and then become witnesses to this light. The man does not have a name but is called “the man” (anthropos in Greek). This is the generic word for human being – as opposed to the specific word for male, aner. Anthropos, for example, can be applied to women if a feminine article is used.

The disciples who asked the first question are also Christians – but agonizing over life’s mysteries. The neighbors who ask questions about the man are inquirers, those attracted to the Christian message but not yet committed to it. The Pharisees (who later in story become “the Jews”) represent the officialdom of Judaism persecuting the early church. The parents are crypto-Christians – those fearful of persecution. Jesus in the story is a transcendent figure who incorporates the earthly, historical Jesus, the Easter Jesus and the Jesus worshipped in the early church.

The story has the structure of a trial scene (one of many found in the Gospel). The man born blind is the defendant – but judgment when it comes falls on the reader. The reader is placed in a situation of spiritual crisis and asked to make a choice.

The story begins with a discussion about sin. The disciples ask who sinned – the man or his parents. Jesus replies that human disability is not the result of sin – rather it is an opportunity for God’s work to be revealed. Bad things happen that much greater good can be done. But God’s work must be done “while it is still day” - an announcement of the coming crisis.

Jesus makes mud from earth and saliva and places it on the man’s eyes. The mud is mentioned four times in the story – underscoring its significance. There are different layers of meaning here. Mud on a person’s eyes is counterintuitive as a means for curing blindness. It is as if we have to obscure our vision, make our blindness obvious, in order to see with new eyes. Humans cannot see. It is this blindness (not original sin—a legal penal concept) that we have been born into. Just as the man born blind does not ask for healing, so we have been unaware of our blindness. The mud also evokes the original clay from which human beings were formed by God in Genesis 2:7. Jesus adds his saliva, his “DNA”, to create a new humanity. Generic man is recreated as the new human by Jesus. This newness is recognized by the man’s neighbors who question whether this is the same man. The old and new humanity look the same but there is something different. The healed man asserts that “I am the man”. He uses the Jesus terminology “I am” – the new human takes on the role of Jesus.

Jesus sends the man to the pool of Siloam (a name that means “sent”). The man obeys and is healed. Healing can only come through obeying, through surrender. You cannot see your way to healing – you must surrender to it.

After his healing the man is subjected to a series of interrogations. The neighbors ask how to find Jesus. The man replies that he does not know. Unlike the crippled man healed in chapter 5 who when questioned does not know who his healer is, the man born blind acknowledges Jesus and gradually comes to know him as the story unfolds. The crippled man remains in darkness, while the man born blind begins to see. The man is then questioned by the Pharisees. They accuse Jesus of not being from God because he healed on the Sabbath. The man defends Jesus, saying that he is a prophet.

The Jews question the man’s parents – implying that they lied about their son’s blindness. The parents deflect the questions back to the healed man. Like some would-be Christians at the end of the 1st century they are afraid of being put out of the synagogue.

The man is then questioned by the Jews. They demand that the man “give glory to God” by declaring Jesus a sinner. This is often religion’s way of glorifying God – categorizing sinners and rejecting the evil ones. This is what the disciples were seeking to do at the beginning of the story (“who sinned?”) This is an example of Johannine irony. The Jewish authorities fail to understand the true way of giving glory to God. Jesus heals the man born blind so that “God’s work might be revealed in him” – to reveal God’s glory. God’s glory is revealed when his work is carried out through us and that work is to end the human system based on violent differences and exclusion. In contrast the authorities want to label Jesus as a sinner. They accuse Jesus of being a sinner and demand to know how he opened the man’s eyes.

The Jews revile the healed man by saying that he is Jesus’ disciple while they are disciples of Moses. Jesus has no authority because no one knows where he comes from. (This contrasts with Jn 7:40-52 where Jesus is rejected because he is known to have come from Galilee). The man responds by saying that never since the world began has someone opened the eyes of a man born blind, yet they do not know where he comes from. Such an unprecedented, singular event in human history has to come from God. Jesus cannot be a sinner because God listens to him. The Jews accuse the man of being born in sin, therefore judged by God, and as such has no grounds for argument. He is excluded by the thought of a God who excludes. They drive him away.

It is at this moment, after his persecution and rejection that Jesus seeks him out. Jesus asks him “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” This is the peak moment of the story. The words “Son of Man” have more importance in terms of power and impact than the term “Messiah” in John’s Gospel. Jesus is asking in effect “Do you believe in the child of human beings?”: i.e. the new humanity. Other mentions of the Son of Man in John are found in Ch 3:14 (“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up”); 8:28 (“When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he”) and 12:32-36 (“‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. The crowd answered him, ‘We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?’ Jesus said to them ‘The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light’”).

The Son of Man is the decisive figure of human transformation and judgment. In John 5:26 authority to execute judgment comes through the Son of Man. This authority comes from his having been “lifted up” – through his crucifixion as the end of all systems of violent difference and exclusion. Judgment is understood, not in terms of sin, but in the rejection of this transformation Jesus brings. In Jn 9:41 Jesus says that “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say ‘we see’, your sin remains”. We return here to the true nature of sin. It is not about human disability or original sin. Paul’s assertion that “Sin came into the world through one man (Adam)” has been interpreted legalistically. In contrast John’s gospel is not talking of original sin, rather our human condition –we are stupid and blind. It is not our fault unless we choose to remain that way when offered enlightenment in the new humanity of Jesus. The sin consists not in the original blindness, but in claiming to see. It is related to our response to Jesus’ call to enlightenment. We can accept or reject. We are called to accept that we need new eyes and receive our new sight from Jesus. We are called from blindness to sight.

This acceptance of a new way of being human leads us to a new understanding of Jesus’ divinity. At the end of John’s Gospel Pilate says “Behold the Man” (Jn 19:5). Jesus is the prototype of the new human. But through his passion and crucifixion the Son of Man is revealed also as the Son of God. Only the Son of God could bring a completely new way of being human which overcomes the generative power of violence. That is why Jesus is God and worthy of worship. The man born blind worships Jesus when he reveals himself to him as the Son of Man. Thus he completes the full trajectory of Christian conversion. Like the Christians in the Johannine community the man born blind believes in Jesus, despite adversity and persecution, and acknowledges him as Lord.

Violent Mammon

I was driving back from having the family car serviced and trying to recover from the galactic shock of how much it cost and it struck me I have never posted about the mimetic roots of money!


And then I thought how important this really is, cost of a car service or not. It represents a big emerging question for Christians, like so many other things…

It’s of course a question of desire. Capitalism depends on desire, both in its hyped-up form as consumerism, but before that in the basic exchange of goods via money. Have you ever wondered why we automatically pay for stuff we get from the stores? Of course we know we will be arrested if we walk out without paying. But do you normally think about that? I’m certain ninety nine times out of a hundred the formal sanction doesn’t enter people’s minds. So then, is it morality, doing the decent thing? Sure, basic moral formation must play some sort of a role, but you know how unreliable that is. There must be something else, something more primitive, more automatic, to make it work so seamlessly.

And indeed there is. There is a more primary mechanism deeply embedded in humanity which anthropologists have described in one form or another. Imagine you were out in the bush and doing a trade, water for a sun hat, or a skin for a knife, something like that: there would be a powerful sense incumbent on the parties to complete the trade as agreed. You would perhaps fear the direct violence that would erupt if you did not, but just as likely the trade in and of itself would have meaning and power.

The reason for this is mimetic relationship, and the violence that goes with it, have morphed over hundreds of thousands of years into a structural program of credit and debt. The possibility of direct violence if I don’t complete the trade is secondary to a much deeper sense that I am bound to give over one item in exchange for another—but, all the time, and all the same, it depends deeply on violence and that is the point to keep in mind. Here is how it goes.

According to mimetic theory if I have object A you will desire to get A (my personal want for it makes you want it), and then if you take away object A I will fight fiercely for it. However, if I know in advance you desire A because I have it then at some point I can get you to give me object B because you have it and I desire it! This is quite unconscious and we can be sure that the actual process of going from two different desires for two different objects, to an actual peaceful exchange was fraught with extreme danger and any number of situations when the whole thing broke down into a fearful brawl. To even get to that point most likely depended on numerous intermediary steps and took millennia to achieve.

Take for example the institution of the taonga among the Maori, an object which is “given” but demands in itself or “spiritually” the return gift of another object (or the same one); or the kula shells and armbands in the islands off Papua New Guinea, that are exchanged in a huge circle given and received, but always “belonging” to their original owner. This type of highly ritual exchange may well have preceded and/or accompanied more ordinary economic exchanges--setting up a peaceful or "holy" sense of exchange. The point I am making is that embedded in the system itself is a hidden and constant charge of violence which has become “contained” or institutionalized in and as the system itself.

When you sell, say, some vegetables or a bicycle you don’t normally think about the possible need for fighting the person who takes your goods, rather there is an implicit faith that this other person will pay up. Why? Because, the violence of the original desire for the object has become deferred or latent in the system. It acts as a cultural institution in its own right which has a huge hold on all of us, but its roots lie in archaic sacred violence. The evolution of normal currency demonstrates this: coins and paper money are always stamped with symbols of the state and what else but the sacred violence of the state is symbolized, providing the backing for the piece of metal or paper? This is evident in Roman coinage with its figures of imperial Caesars, but even in modern democratic currency the whole thing is scattered around with awe-inspiring images of presidents, pyramids, eyes and seals etc. etc., loaded with sacrificial violence. It says this here is worth something because at its heart is overwhelming violence!

To analyze money this way is no different from asserting that “our struggle is…against the rulers, the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness.” (Eph.6:12) And Jesus said it more clearly: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” What is different today is we have the human-science tools to delve deeper into the roots of human culture and understand what Jesus was talking about when he expressed himself in his typical prophetic and elliptic manner. It means that, more than ever, while as Christians we continue having to use money we are committed to sharing and showing a completely different manner of living.

The Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus, is sheer gift. It undoes all the violence of the world in a single breathtaking event of generosity and outpouring love, of fore-giveness. It is the true event of creation—when the human pathway comes to maturity, when the half-baked, futile-minded, violence-rooted humanity that we have known until now gives way to an inconceivable emergence of another way. It means that when Christians realize this, understand this, they no longer live according to the violence of capitalism, of an exchange system based in violence, but according to the marvelous new economy of giving and love instituted by Jesus.

Christians have been so used to compromising with capitalism, or even positively embracing it as guided by God (the same God as Jesus’ Father who cares for the birds and the flowers and us, without asking anything in return!), that it might be a matter of despair to think that we could begin to take up this gospel practice of “giveness”. But I am not cast down. It seems that the truth of the new human way cannot help but emerge, and with it a progressive shift in Christian practice. I think one day, and not too long in the future, going to church on Sunday as the mark of being a Christian will be as irrelevant as sacrificing a lamb or a bull is to being Jewish. Something else, something much more beautiful, dangerous, radical, hopeful and human will begin to take its place. The growing intertwined crises of the West are demanding it from the roots of our being, because in so many ways it is the half-baked gospel that has set these crises in motion. The Spirit of God cries out from our hearts, “Now, now is the time for Christians to be faithful to the depth of their calling, because the superficial version is falling apart and is also making the world fall apart.” The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let everyone who hears say, “Come!”

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

John #8

Here is the next Bible Study Summary. We would love to know if these are helpful - are you using them as a tool to help group Bible Study? For personal study? Do you have any comments or suggestions...? It would be great to get feedback from you.
- Peace, Linda.

As well as the Gospel and letters of John this Bible study uses the book “Written that you may believe: Encountering Jesus in the fourth Gospel” by Sandra M. Schneiders (2003) Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, NY.

Background reading to study #8 Written that you may believe chapter 8.

The Gospel of John #8 – Feminism in John 06/10/10

Women are important figures in John’s Gospel. While there have been many oppressed groups, women within these groups have been an even more oppressed minority. The Bible has both condoned this oppression and spoken out against it. The Bible makes an option for the poor and oppressed, and in so doing gives oppressed peoples a voice. But the text itself is pervasively androcentric and patriarchal, frequently sexist and at times even misogynist. In many ways it has been responsible for serious oppression of women (think the blaming of Eve). This has led some feminist scholars to declare the text irredeemable.

The meaning of the Biblical text is constrained by the ideology of those interpreting it. Everyone has an ideology and until recently all Biblical scholars were predominantly men and leaders of patriarchal churches. A characteristic of ideology is that it is invisible to those propagating it. Women have an advantage (paradoxical) because they can see the way interpretation works oppressively and can be freed up for other understandings. They are in a unique position to rescue the text. For example: identifying texts with liberating potential such as Martha sitting at the feet of Jesus – a technical phrase implying discipleship.

In John 4:1-42 we have the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. A traditional, superficial reading portrays a somewhat flighty, promiscuous woman who has had five husbands strangely in conversation with Jesus. A more careful exploration of the text would lead us to the realization that it is improbable that a woman at that time would have out-lived 5 husbands. (With childbirth mortality the reverse would have been more likely.) Another meaning for these five relationships should be sought….

The Samaritans were close to the Jews, but were considered heretical. They were neither racially nor culturally pure. 2 Kings 17:24-34 tells of the introduction of peoples to the kingdom of northern Israel after its destruction by Assyria. The Israelites had been deported and other displaced peoples settled in their place. These imported peoples came from five different nations. The Assyrian king sent a Jewish priest back so that the Jewish God would be honored and look favorably on the foreign immigrants, but the new settlers continued also to worship their own gods. The Samaritans therefore were a mixed race who recognized the Jewish faith, but who had according to the Judeans polluted this faith with that of the gods of five other nations. When Jesus speaks of husbands he is talking as a prophet. For the biblical tradition the Lord was the husband of the people, the bridegroom of Hosea and Jeremiah, and by implication other gods are adulterous husbands. The woman at the well understands that he is talking in this vein about the Samaritan faith (not her personal life): “Sir, I see that you are a prophet”.

She continues the conversation “Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem”. Jesus replies by saying that the Samaritans worship what they do not know, the Jews what they do know. The Jews have the true relationship, the one that leads to a true knowledge. Jesus goes on to say that true worship is not linked to a place, but takes place in spirit and truth. The Samaritan woman begins to relate to this. “I know the Messiah is coming…he will proclaim all things to us”. Jesus answers “I am he” – the first time in the Gospel he has used the divine “I am”. She is the first person to receive the full revelation of Christ in the Gospel. She leaves her water jar (like the disciples leaving their nets) and becomes the initiator of the mission to the Samaritans. She goes to the town and says in v. 29 “Is he not the Christ?”- i.e. a rhetorical assertion and invitation. This is the original Greek – a more positive reading than the NRSV translation: “he cannot be the Messiah, can he?” The latter makes her sound more ditzy, less assured. Our reading shows how this woman has been undermined by both poor translation and a misunderstanding of the meaning of the text.

When the disciples return their uneasiness reflects the concern of the emerging male hierarchy at the stage when the gospel was being written. That Jesus should be in theological conversation with an unmarried woman is shocking. The woman is arguing and thinking like a rabbi, or at least a rabbi’s student – like Mary of Bethany sitting at the feet of Jesus. She is also a woman who adopts the role of apostle, carrying the gospel to a community that has not heard it before. In contrast the story is placed in John’s Gospel after the story of a man, Nicodemus – who does not present well in comparison.

It is not clear whether this was an historical event. It is an archetypal biblical story – the meeting between a man and a woman at a well. Isaac, Jacob and Moses all had such meetings at wells. Wells were places where women and men could meet without comment. They were places where wooing took place. In the Johannine story Jesus meets the woman at the most famous of all wells – Jacob’s well. Jesus is depicted as the true bridegroom. He comes to claim Samaria. He reaches out to embrace all those on the outside – Samaritans and women.

The story may be a literary device that validates the influence of newly converted Samaritans in the Johannine community. After Stephen was killed in Jerusalem many Christians left Jerusalem. Some of these started a mission in Samaria. They were Hellenistic converts and did not demand circumcision or conform to the Jewish dietary laws. This story reflects the spreading of the gospel in Samaria. The woman also may have been a literary creation representing generic “woman” – as is found elsewhere in the Gospel.

That a story that presents women so positively was written at all indicates the highly respected status of women in the Johannine community. It implies that women were accepted in roles of leadership and authority.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

An ex-priest deceased, a dog that died, and the Holy Trinity

I’ve been reading proofs, doing conferences and road trips, and dealing with home remodeling. Thinking gets too much like all the blown dust on all the various surfaces to want to gather it in any kind of a blog. However, there is something besides thought, isn’t there, and somehow in the past week or so I have felt it quite strongly. There is something called contemplation. It is a big word, but I find it preferable to meditation because meditation is something you do; contemplation is something that happens to you.


How then to write about something that is passive, something that happens when you actually stop doing things? Well, relationship is one way. I have felt the power of certain relationships.

With the conferences and connections of these past several weeks I have become very aware that there is a circuit which for me makes up a sense of the Spirit’s transforming presence. It consists (though not exclusively) of organizations like Wood Hath Hope, and Theology and Peace (http://www.theologyandpeace.org/), and the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (http://www.uibk.ac.at/theol/cover/ ), and numerous significant individuals scattered through and around all of that. I’m not saying this circuit is ideal in any way (a kind of true church), nor that it couldn’t shift or change, nor that there are no others like it, but that for me in the concrete it was a kind of fuzzy or shadow image of the circuit in God which we call the Trinity. Whoa! I can almost hear it being said. Right there seems like a huge claim. But why should it be so outlandish? Jesus said, “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” and he did not mean this in any airy-fairy, holier-than-thou kind of way, but one absolutely concrete and real. What he meant was that his followers would become part of the circle of absolute giving and living which he experienced from his Father and was teaching to the rest of us.

A possible translation or paraphrase of “perfect” is “one who has reached the end or goal.” What it means for Jesus, however, is paradoxical. It means that the end or goal of the Father is the beginning of another in love. Jesus experiences the Father as pouring himself out completely for him and for the world. And then anyone who imitates the Father reaches his or her goal or end by giving himself/herself reciprocally for the sake of, for the beginning of the other. Jesus of course does this first and supremely, and then putting the Spirit into the picture creates an endless circle of giving between a threesome. This becomes the meaning of Trinity, where each for ever allows the other to receive the boundless life arising from the first giving. When we begin to imitate the Father and Jesus the circuit becomes a foursome, with the fourth member made up of millions and millions of individuals or sub-circuits replaying the life of the original circuit. Each individual or small human circuit imitates the Trinity, with one individual or group continuing the love of the one before and giving his/her/their life for the next, and so on, on and on! The circuit creates a circle full of ends which are always beginnings, and so is wonderfully end-less!

Just sensing this circuit, at any level, is an event of contemplation.

But, of course, this sense can easily disappear. It only takes something to go wrong, for someone to have a difference of opinion and begin to reciprocate with anger or negation, and the experience of the end-less circle of the Trinity disappears like morning mist. And we are left as always with the harsh glare of a violent world order.

So, again, how to communicate this strong sense of contemplation, to say that it’s really real, so you can feel it and overcome the world?

This week in Syracuse I experienced two deaths both of which touched me personally. The first was a former R.C. priest, a well-known and well-loved married and family man, social advocate, peace activist, ex-director of a L’Arche house, and all round good guy. Frank was gentle and thoughtful, someone who modeled nonviolence and, more than anyone I know, evinced the Spirit-given compatibility of priesthood and marriage. There were hundreds and hundreds at the calling hours; it took for ever for the crowd slowly to snake round to greet his widow. And the other death? Well, it was that of a German Shepherd dog called Ginger. I knew this dog through her owner whom I often met while walking my own dog, Sofia. This man loved his dog, caring for her through multiple health problems, spending thousands if not tens of thousands on treatments and operations. I did a little private calling hour with this man stopping my car by his house where so often before he had hung out in his yard with his dog. I listened to the story of Ginger’s final days and felt the connection for him when he said his dog was “one in ten mil.”

There’s no way the significance of the dog’s life can be measured against Frank’s. Frank will be remembered by history, Ginger will not. Frank impacted many thousands of people, on moral and philosophical issues of human dignity, destiny, God, war, peace etc. The dog impacted only one life, and in that basically nonconceptual way in which we relate to dogs and cats etc. She was a dumb animal. But Ginger was intensely meaningful to her owner, and when it comes to that kind of meaning in the human heart, you can’t really make a hierarchy between the meaning that Frank represented for his community and the meaning that Ginger had for her owner. This kind of meaning is an imponderable mix, of love, companionship, present peace, proximity, hope, pleasure. Between these cases, Frank’s and Gingers’s, therefore, there is an undeniable continuum, of human meaning, truth, of reality, and as I connected with this meaning in both these cases I entered a kind of field of contemplation, a place where I shared these deep sensations.

Ah, that then is perhaps a way of describing it! The senses that arise when through love we feel a life poured forth in love, and it fills us with more love, and with associated peace, compassion, gentleness, hope. Contemplation is a Trinity moment, one that is always seeking to take over the whole world.

By making the meaning of contemplation continuous with the meaning of a human life, the meaning of a dog’s life, we see how completely real it is. Christians too often see contemplation as something that touches on a separate realm of existence, heavenly, out of this world. No, it touches this world, and in the most truly meaningful way.

What would it be like if Christians lived in a continual state of Trinity contemplation, of deep transformative meaning, in the same way that Ginger’s owner lived and lives in emotions related to his dog, and Frank’s friends and admirers live in relation to the emotions he invokes? What would it be like, if prayer and its inner sense were to be that real?

Tony