Shaking Pivots! (or making space for the space God has made)

My friend, Jerry from Liverpool wrote saying he liked the blog “Falling Pregnant” but didn’t get the last paragraphs about “making space for God.” So I tehought I’d follow-up.
The way I take here might not first seem to the point, but stay on it and it should get there. So here goes.
The world makes perfect sense. It’s just that our ways of understanding it don’t!
Take the Big Bang. It’s not so much that there is this galactic elephant in the room—the question, what caused the Big Bang in the first place: and although I understand that in a scientific and philosophical method sense you just can’t ask this question that doesn’t stop it coming to mind as an ultimate horizon. But aside from that, the whole explosive device and expansion thing seems absurdly one-sided. It’s like what a little boy would imagine, a huge bang and that’s it! There has to be an equal backward flux or return movement for the whole thing to hold together. Only currents and circles and cycles make full sense. And maybe that’s what they’re calling “Dark Matter” is but as yet I’ve not heard it expressed or developed in this way. And if it were it would change our cosmology enormously, and with that our anthropology. Because the way we imagine the universe—and this is a key point—is the way we imagine ourselves. If it’s a mind-numbingly huge explosion we will probably think about our life with ultimate violence as its ultimate sense. If it’s some sort of cycle of surrender and return, then we will perhaps gauge our behavior as gift and love.
Anyway, you see what I mean? From a “making sense” perspective many explanations don’t really make sense. It’s only when you take the human into account—holistically—that you approach a true, full account. Both the universe and the human have to go together. And it’s not a matter of cherry-picking the evidence and forcing the data, because we do that all the time unconsciously anyway. (Einstein said something along these lines: “It is the theory which decides what can be observed.”) We see according to the way we are, and we are according to how we are structured. It’s a creative enterprise and the point is to find a truly life-giving explanation of the universe and humanity all in one, in order that humanity might live. From a biblical point of view you could say that the whole biblical enterprise—the bible itself—is a story told over and over, reimagining the beginning, both in theory and practice, and thus seeking the right ending—one of boundless life.
Today it’s most of all the field of anthropology that underpins the intuition of the profound interconnectedness of our intellectual universe and the way we are as human beings. Our thinking is rooted in how we are set up relationally and structurally. According to Rene Girard it is violence that holds the key to how we are originally structured, and our intellectual universe is based on the world-shaping power of foundational murder at the dawn of culture. Human thinking begins in mythology and ritual, brim full of violence, and science for all its “objectivity,” has not escaped the trauma of its birth.
According to Rene Girard it has been the bible which has provided a progressive revelation of the violent founding mechanisms of humanity. He doesn’t put equal stress on the equivalent revelation of new human mechanisms, of justice, forgiveness and love, but I think this logically has to be the case. Really you can’t have the former without the latter, even if, understandably, the former appears more evident: violence is always more noisily apparent than peace. Part of the problem is that because the biblical pathway has deeply affected human culture the old mechanisms are critically weakened, while people hesitate to turn to the new ones. The result seems more and more chaotic and dangerous. One passage from the bible has been going through my head recently and it seems to sum all this up : “The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called….” The line is from Isaiah’s magnificent vision of the Lord in the temple with the seraphs in attendance and it is their voices calling “holy, holy, holy” which have this thunderous impact (6:1-4). The image communicates the power of what was happening: it is enough to make the temple itself shake, including the hinges on its doors. To my mind, the shaking of the pivots is the trembling of the very system of differentiation whereby we can hinge back and forth smoothly from the world of the archaic sacred—read “mystified violence”—to the world of the ordinary or profane. Let me explain further.
This division of the sacred and profane is commonplace to scholars of religion and culture. But adding in the Girardian piece tells us that it’s really violence that is being negotiated, not some mysterious transcendence. When violence is in the temple it is controlled and directed—used up in sacrifice or directed outward to the enemies of God or the tribe, and so it generally keeps the area of the profane (the broader territory around the temple) free of violence. Thus the world is divided up in an orderly fashion between ritually controlled sacrificial violence and the world at peace around the temple precincts. But now here’s the kicker: the biblical God does not allow this division. This God breaks out in awe-inspiring love to re-found the world, not on violence but forgiveness and love. And so the pivots on the temple doorposts shake!
So now, we can bring all this together and provide an answer to our initial question. If (1) space itself, that is the whole physical (and metaphysical) area around us, used to be controlled by the effects of violence concentrated in a sacred place making the rest of the area relatively safe the rest of the time, and (2) the biblical tradition broadcast in culture has served progressively to break this down, then the meaning of space itself has changed. The change is twofold, each compellingly powerful: on the one hand there is no longer the traditional ordering of the universe (and there are a lot of names for this tectonic change, from freedom, competition, consumerism, to anomie, alienation, anxiety, to lawyers, gun rights, and war on terror), and, on the other, there is also the spontaneous hidden growth of spaces of compassion, forgiveness, peace and love. In other words this anarchy is at the same time the hidden growth of the kingdom because the kingdom is in fact its root cause, the breaking out of awe-inspiring love! I emphasize hidden because it cannot be delimited by the old boundaries and system of boundaries. And so it stays hidden to ordinary bilateral sight! Many people don’t recognize it, don’t think it’s there. But as they say, you will know it when you see it!
Thus, finally, the business of Christians is to seek consciously and actively to act on and create these spaces by lives of love and simple service. Being demarcated by belonging to a temple or church doesn’t really cut it anymore. And that’s what I meant by “making space for God.” By members of Wood Hath Hope sharing a food budget, cooking and some actual meals we are attempting to act on the emergence of new humanity inspired by a God of love. But doing these things does not of itself make the new humanity—to say that would simply create a new temple. It is simply a response in faith both to what only God can accomplish, but also to what God is in fact accomplishing! Making space for God is making space for the space that God has made!

Tony