All posts by Anthony Bartlett

About Anthony Bartlett

The several shifts in my career and life-world (religious vows, priest, social worker, husband and father, immigrant, academic, teacher, theologian) have accumulated a considerable set of perspectives on a number of quite relevant things. It would seem a shame not to use the tools of a blog to air some of these in public. I am currently living with my wife in Syracuse, New York. My children are at college and working. My dog is deaf, barks loudly and fails to appreciate my wisdom despite being named Sofia.

BETHANY SPICE

General Theology

We don’t know how it’s all going to end. We can’t even get a straight picture of how it all began, of how we actually got here. What we do know is the world is at a hugely precarious moment in its history, and there seems to be no intelligent voice speaking for a good and wholesome, human way forward.

At a point like this the gospel stands out more brilliantly than ever. “You are the salt of the earth. You are a city on a hill. Let your light shine!”

The salt and light for our present day is the declaration of God’s unconditional nonviolence. It might seem irrelevant, a random snippet of theology for those who think about these things, but really it’s immense. At the end of the gospel Jesus tells the disciples to “go therefore and teach all nations.” The teaching of divine nonviolence seems to have got lost somewhere along the way—the bit about “love your enemy,” and then you will be just like your Father in heaven. In the first three hundred years of Christianity there was no possible question of any other way. The teaching of nonviolence sustained itself against the Roman Empire simply with prayer, faith and forgiveness.

For some time I have written blogs here trying to explain the teaching in perhaps something of an abstract or intellectual way. But the Bethany Center in Syracuse has become over the years a real focus of life and meaning for a small network of local people and several others online. The teaching is real and life-changing in the hearts of this connected group. It is important to look to the community focus at least as much as to abstract reflection.

Others might say that a small group like this has little or no impact in comparison to the planetary-scale forces at work. But what is strking is how Jesus used the images of very little things having a disproportionate transforming effect on a much larger scale—things like seeds, yeast, salt. The same thing can be said of herbs and spices and their ability to change the flavor and taste of a whole dish. A small community is like a spice changing the color and texture of everything around it.

I hope from now on to be able to include a little bit of Bethany spice in the blogs on this page.

THE DEEP BETWEEN: A GROWING HUMAN SPACE WHERE VIOLENCE IS TRANSFORMED INTO NONVIOLENCE.

General Theology

Is there a way of talking about our human world today that does not descend rapidly into apocalyptic nightmare, or, alternatively, escape into a religious realm with the promise of a heavenly otherworld to be enjoyed after all this is over?

This question struck me forcibly at a recent conference in Paris that came together on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of René Girard. Girard is famous for discovering human mimesis, the insight that people copy each other preconsciously, and especially in the area of desire. When we understand this, we easily see how wars arise and escalate, and at the conference this was underlined. Just like rival individuals, each political power imitates the other in their desire, their demands, and the fury of their military response. Add the fact that each warring party has nukes and we’re on the very brink of apocalypse. Or, what is called “apocalypse.”

The problem is that the biblical book that gives us this term (the last book of the bible) actually means by it “revelation,” a drawing back of the veil. And part of the revelation (the apocalypse)—along with the violence—is the nonviolent Lamb, a figure which presides over the whole book and in the end gains final wonderful victory on earth.

How does this happen? Is it purely supernatural? Some form of scriptural magic? (In which case, open to serious doubt as a fanciful fairy story.) Or, is there some kind of real and rooted human process than can and will bring this end about?

When people come together at a conference like the one in Paris there are a lot of thoughts and ideas whirling around, and things can often be seen in startling new ways. One of Girard’s original concepts was what he called the “interdividual,” meaning that human beings are not solitary psyches, but actually an open-ended system of interaction and agency with others. A psychologist working with these ideas came up with the happy expression “the self between.” The self is not a godlike pure consciousness, but a mutual product together with others with whom they are in relation. Humanity is always a dense interwoven system of possible and actual connections with others. This “self between” was mentioned at the conference, and it implies that any of us, any “self,” will always and necessarily be in constant interchange with others to achieve our very identity and being in the world.

Another of the concepts at the conference came from Benoit Chantre, the most important of Girard’s collaborators in the final period of his career. Chantre suggested to Girard the idea of “intimate mediation,” something which Girard accepted. This needs a bit of explanation. An original distinction made by Girard was between what he called “external” and “internal” mediation. Essentially this means we all choose models in our lives. A model that truly has our admiration, respect, and honor exercises “external mediation.” Such a model shows us elements of conduct and behavior that we seek to copy, but we never enter into competition with that model. “Internal mediation,” on the other hand, refers to a model which becomes our rival, one whose actual way of being in the world we want to possess and have for ourselves. Bob Dylan perhaps said it best: “You’re gonna have to serve somebody . . . it may be the devil, it may be the Lord . . .” In Girardian terms “the Lord” would be somebody you truly honor, while “the devil” is the rival who makes your life hell.

What Chantre added is really dramatic. He points to a third way, a mediation that goes in another direction altogether, not to something outside and above ourselves which keeps order, nor to something inside ourselves which torments us and creates disorder. Rather, there is something that enters into our selves, in the very same “between” space that the rival enters, but with an entirely different dynamic and outcome. Chantre does not explain this in great detail, but he does say explicitly and precisely that the “intimate mediator” is not our rival.

How does this work? The thought that I added at the conference was that intimate mediation was necessarily nonviolent. It cannot enter into our “selves” in the same place as “internal mediation” and not create rivalry unless it is essentially nonviolent. This would then be close to Dylan’s poetic and biblical thought of “the Lord.” In a world of interior mediation (inside the self) every other model can provoke rivalry. Only the supremely nonviolent, nonresisting Lamb can exercise mediation in the self and not provoke us to retaliate.

But this should not at all be understood in a dogmatic religious sense. It is saying something quite different from “everyone should be a Christian.” First, if interdividual psychology is correct then it means that there is always this “space between” human beings. It is a space that has been steadily growing in power in the romantic ages, until now when just about everyone on the planet is involved in some kind of internal relationship. But, at the same time, the figure of the nonresisting Christ has inspired countless imitators, from Stephen of the New Testament, through to Gandhi, Bonhoeffer, MLK Jr, Romero, Mandela, Edith Stein, Rajani Thiranagama etc. These are heroic, boundary figures, but what they represent is a progression of the “space between” to a progressively new depth and human agency. Here people are prepared to give everything without retaliatory violence, in order to bring life for others. All of them relate to this space for personal reasons, with different kinds of stories and probably different levels of clarity. But what is consistent is the opening up of this space, such that it deserves its own name. Because it represents a depth of giving, a surrender to a sea without bottom where the very water is giving for the sake of others, it might be called “the deep between.”

My argument is that this is a real space, one that stands as radical alternative to mimetic rivalry, violence, and war. Many people don’t recognize it, possibly thinking it a kind of idiocy, or, at best, a religious dream. But the whole Girardian scientific logic, through psychologists like Oughourlian, and astute companions and commentators like Chantres, leads necessarily to this. It is in fact a matter of a general human structure, hidden to the light that looks only at rivalry and violence, but just as real as those things, and even more so. It lacks guns, tanks, bombs, planes, generals, and tyrants. But, nevertheless, it leaves an actual and powerful trace in that world. MLK Jr leaves a trace. Edith Stein leaves a trace. And the trace creates further traces, which are signs and structures that enable peace to flourish. Peace and disarmament treaties, commissions on truth and reconciliation, peace activists, artists and artisans, campaigners for the environment and for the ethical treatment of animals, all these things are traces of the deep between. It is vital to bring this human space to prominence, because unless this space is effective and spoken about, the discourse of war and escalation appears inevitable. (Girard’s own word is “implacable.”) On the contrary, there is no apocalyptic doom, because there is an actual alternative human space of nonviolence and peace which is practically effective in human affairs. It seems vital to continue to raise this space to public discourse in order that it might challenge the fatalism of the so-called apocalypse.

A particularly telling example of ”the deep between” I might suggest is the teaching and conduct of a Turkish Islamic leader by the name of Fetullah Gulen. In the nineteen seventies this person founded a movement called “Hizmet” (service) which now comprises several million followers. They work across the world in hospitals, schools, aid projects, media outlets, but they have been subjected to severe persecution in their native Turkey, falsely labelled “terrorists” by a dictatorial regime needing a convenient scapegoat. Gulen is himself in exile in the U.S., constantly under threat from political forces both in Turkey and the U.S. But he consistently teaches nonviolence to his followers. His words that I give below serve to demonstrate that the human space I am talking about does not belong to the religion of Christianity but is arising organically in the world as a transformed way of being human on the planet. Certain spiritual leaders may see it more clearly because they are sensitive to the transformative impact of revelation. But, once again, that does not remove it from the human. On the contrary, this revelation is radically about being human. The following words belong to a discourse that rises up in our time as a tide of human meaning alternative to the violent clichés of “apocalypse.”

Prepare yourself to forgive these people who committed genocide against you. When they come back with a sorry heart, let them find you with an open arm. Do not become a tyrant yourself by responding in kind. You are fighters of love.

THE TRANSFORMATIVE ICON OF SHEEP

Anthropo-theology,

The church rises up, a sudden eruption of art and meaning on a sun-beaten coastal plain. The place used to be abutting a strategic harbor next to the sea until the shoreline moved away. Now its sudden presence in the middle of nowhere reinforces the feeling of a wonderful alien interruption of standard human affairs. Like a beautiful mother-ship set down to invite travelers to journey to another world.

In literal terms the building should be understood as the Christian re-imagining of the standard imperial urban “basilica,” the roofed public space for the conduct of Roman business and law. Because Christian gatherings were not the private sacral space of the temple, reserved for the god and the priests, but rather a communal assembly and event, these big buildings made an ideal template. As the Christian movement emerged from persecution and hiding it imitated the secular buildings where citizens came together freely for ordinary human affairs. First lesson, therefore: a “basilica” is essentially a secular space, something  ordinary, human, communal, down-to-earth.

Basilica of San Apollinare in Classe

Second thing: some context. This church, along with others in the neighboring Adriatic city of Ravenna, reflect the political and military success of Justinian I, the Byzantine Roman Emperor lately taking power back from barbarian conquerors of Italy. Justinian saw it as his job to ensure the conformity of everyone in his empire to orthodox Christian faith, meaning, essentially, the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, fully divine, fully human. This is a far cry from Christian faith as a persecuted and despised minority religion, which was the case just a little over two centuries prior. But imperial politics are not entirely the point here.

What is the point is the wonder of a vision which saw human existence fully caught up in divine existence. While the emperor and his violence knew themselves supported and endorsed by Christian institutional religion, the core vision of this splendid church by the sea is of a humanity completely transformed by communication of nonviolent divinity. In the glorious crowning image of the apse there is no other-worldly procession of saints and martyrs, nor any hint of the emperor or his court, only a panorama of sheep in a land of peace! Whoever conceived this majestic mosaic figured humanity’s identification with the divine not in terms of a disembodied spiritual other-world but an earth turned entirely to its own deepest possibilities of love, nonviolence and life. The doctrine of the two natures and one person was for this visionary artist a human world set free from harm. The divine conjoined to the human meant the communication of divine nonviolence to every relational being, and therewith the creation of the truly human and divine person.

So, a third thing: the beauty of sheep! What are these animals raised to the roof of an imperial building where before it was likely Winged Victory with horses and a war chariot looking down? These are the defenseless, the meek, the disarmed, the humble, the creatures at the wrong end of humanity’s systems of force and blood-letting. But now somehow they are in a land made just for them, a land of tranquility and plenty, with not a sword in sight! It is alternative human space. It is the public building, the basilica, made for the conduct of human affairs by active means other than violence.

San Apollinare Apse

Image of sheep icon, from San Vitale, Ravenna

As you enter the main building the wide welcoming sweep of a foot-worn marble floor underscores there are no seats or pews where people sit to become passive recipients of doctrine. There is only a standing space of human interaction and proximity. The gleam of the floor naturally invites you in, and then lifts up the head to where the light pours through the windows above. There is a great deal of light. The pillars of flowing marble also lead upward and onward, toward the luminous final vision of the triumphal apse. And there the wonder reveals itself. It is here that this public space declares its most profound and generative meaning. It is not simply a concourse of citizens, but a gathering of the human species, onetime victims of their own chronic violence, now transformed into something dramatically and miraculously new. The glowing color of the apse is green, the kind of green of a field or wood at the turn from spring to summer, fresh, warm, touchable, edible, endless. And the dominant figure or symbol within the intense wash of green is the sheep.

Sheep are everywhere, two sets of twelve, and three in the middle. Below they surround the (first or second century) martyr-bishop Apollinaris in the figure of the Good Shepherd, above they stream from images of the New Jerusalem set in the corners of the vertical wall. The iconography bends the world inside out, with the standard victim of human slaughter become now the symbol of humanity set free from violence, in a space of sensate peace and pleasure. How is this perceptual-spatial miracle possible? It can only be by means of a twisting around of normally imagined space, where the victim is systematically not figured, where human business is conducted as usual. Or, if the victim is figured, it is in the shadow of triumphant violence. Here instead the archetypal object of killing, the sheep, becomes the triumphant master image, radiating its inherent nonretaliation as the orchestrating theme of space itself. It is a miracle of art and figuration, but it is born not from artistic imagination as such but from something that has occurred in the public space of citizens below. Thus, the basilica becomes not a place of the king and his many weapons, but of the king’s many vanquished citizens—and possibly the king too—now willingly embracing the loss of weaponry. The icon of the sheep as the brilliant central motif of this space turns the basilica upside down, making it light as air, floating with its inhabitants, like astronauts, in a new order of gravity. The Roman public building has gone from law court, institution of human violence, to an outer/inner space of grace, the transformed dimensions of nonviolent human being. Centuries of Christianity as business-as-usual has masked this transformation catastrophically, but now little by little its deep revolution in human space is being recognized for what it is, in and through spontaneous eruptions like this basilica on the shores of the Adriatic. 

GUNS, GODS, AND NEW HUMANITY

Anthropo-theology, ,

How can you write humanly about something inhuman: the massacre of nineteen elementary school children, plus two teachers, by a random gunman armed with weapons of war? Don’t we need another way of talking, another idiom, one that is actually inhuman, to describe it? Nothing else can do.

The events in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX, belong to a background of school shootings stretching back over twenty years. Names like Columbine, Sandy Hook, Stoneman Douglas, are signature items in a roll call of social doom able to strike anywhere, anytime, without anyone able to do anything to stop it. The present resulting age of constant extreme social anxiety is the definition of the loss of functional humanity.

Some commentators reach back to themes of child sacrifice to explain things, and this, I think, is a language close to what might fit. But it is still not inhuman enough. After all, sacrifice, even child sacrifice, is something human beings have frequently done, as the Bible attests. What makes it intelligibly human is that it is intended to resolve a communal problem of stress, fear and anxiety, by channeling the group crisis onto a designated victim, and so allowing everyone else to find some level of overall meaning, order and well-being in their lives. But school shootings (and mass shootings generally) have no feasible outcome of communal success and well-being. Rather they serve only to increase anxiety, fear, anger, desperation, and further breakdown. If anything, they are actually anti-sacrificial: fraying the bonds of social cohesion and meaning, leading only to further eruptions of crisis and violence. School shootings are the mark of breakdown in the construct of human community itself.

The theoretical anthropologist, René Girard, had a term for this. It is a vital concept to help us understand the present situation. The term is “sacrificial crisis.” This means a situation where the effects of sacrificial order—the basis for Girard of human culture—are so eroded that violence can break out massively and anywhere in a constant attempt to re-found the world. He is talking about the cyclical nature of human violence at the root of culture, and situations where its built-in instability has overtaken its temporary stability. It is de facto a situation of terrible anxiety where human society begins desperately to look for a new scapegoat or victim, so that it can feel better about itself and go along with its business as before. But the single shooter does not seek this sacrificial solution, and the gun lobby behind him, that protects his ability to acquire the instrument of random killing, is likewise not interested in this outcome. They are not thinking humanly, in the way that all other cultures seem to have thought. Something else is going on.

What Girard did not specifically identify is what should be called the institutionalization of sacrificial crisis. Rather than resolve its tensions in a new sacred order, this condition finds its meaning and purpose in a permanent state of open violence, with each separate horror part of a rolling crisis which is its own overall justification. The option depends on a quite particular set of circumstances, including large landmass and material resources not threatened by local breakdown, a society of intense rivalry and competition, a background history of armed violence against minority groups, a founding legal document seeming to enshrine the right to carry guns unconditionally, and available weaponry of extreme power capable of killing many people in a very short space of time.

Sound familiar?

These circumstances create their own spiritual condition which must be understood in and for itself, and that indeed has to be the point. Human beings have never quite known anything like this before, and so the situation has to be considered effectively inhuman; or so novel for humans that they lack any intelligible language to talk about it. The permanent state of open violence becomes its own way of being in the world, brought about by the particular circumstances described, but taking on an independent godlike status. In the past the godlike associations of violence would have been rolled quickly back into a given religious/sacrificial system, but today they carry a free-floating identity as self-vindicating open violence. They are a god without a face.

Unless the anonymous face is perhaps the gun itself.

The gun kills, the gun continues to kill, the gun is immune from blame, the gun must therefore be a god. For many this is a noxious, inhuman god, one that is not tolerable for any society. But for many others this is a god that indeed may not be questioned. Those who feel this latter way are in the unique situation of espousing a religious emotion in relation to something that functions in an inverse way to religion.

It carries out sacrificial violence, but it gathers no community; it kills its victims but creates no peace; it exercises its priesthood, but considers nothing sacred; it enacts its logic, but produces no meaning. This is inhuman, but it is real.

Because this is a spiritual condition it is not sufficient to double down on attempts to blame, including the gun itself. Mobilizing the community to cast out the evil thing with anger and righteousness will only repeat the dynamics of violence and get more people armed. Blaming the gun ends with people carrying more guns. What is needed instead is an equal and alternative novelty of spirituality, one that responds to the inhumanity of the gun with, in fact, a new humanity. There has to be a revolutionary discovery of nonviolence and compassion, the willingness not to respond to violence with violence, the opening of new transcendent space of peace and forgiveness that deliberately and radically lets go of the gun.

How can this happen? I’m sure in fact that it’s already happening in many individual stories and lives, but what is necessary in addition is this become a theme, a motif, talked about more and more at the level of commentary, of politics, school, and church and college teaching. Politicians are opportunists by nature, and they respond instinctively to whatever’s in the wind. Even if a fresh spirituality of nonviolence is a minority persuasion, a strong and consistent theology of nonviolence arising in Christian communities will inevitably give energy and voice to common-sense policies of gun-harm reduction. In the end spirituality is what makes society, and the lack of consistent spirituality of nonviolence allows the gridlock of gun politics to persist and persist. We seem to be locked into the anger of the gun itself, with both sides of the debate, figuratively at least, pointing guns at each other. A breakthrough of new humanity in the face of the inhuman is instead the only possible fresh meaning in the impasse.

The very deficit of humanity becomes the possibility of transformed humanity. Are we not in the time itself when the nonviolent spirituality of Jesus arises as the most practical way forward?

WAR AND THE AGE

General Theology, , ,

How do you write a poetry of war? And, by that I mean, the end of war?

The First World War produced the famous British “war poets,” including Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon. At school we learned their inconsolable lament for young manhood cut down in the gobbling carnage of trench war. The trenches pressed huge numbers of human beings together, both as comrades and enemies. The suffering of all those human beings could not be ignored, so there was inevitably a poetry, one essentially of the end of war

But now everything is digital, smart, hypersonic, nuclear, without any time to see or think. What can be seen is in fact only another digital product, the media which surrounds us 24/7 and takes on a life of its own. How can you trust what is presented to you? Even if it’s true and factual its enormous immediacy in our sitting rooms overwhelms our ability to meditate humanly, deeply and clearly. Not even Homer, I think, could have written about modern war—because modern media does not allow the human space for reflection and art. Instead it carries us along on the relentless tide of war itself, and indeed of total war.

Which brings us to the teaching of the gospel. The gospel is the only resource that can restore primacy to the human in the context of modern war. It creates its own, vital distance.  “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. These things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom . . . All these are but the beginning of birth pangs.” (Matt 24:6-8)

The gospel tells us not to trust to war, and its media, for the ultimate meanings of humanity. This is an absolutely essential teaching for our modern age with its terminal despairing perceptions. This is not to underestimate the destructive forces in the hands of human beings, and the possibility of their unleashing them, and indeed the fact of their already being unleashed. But what it does tell us is that the gospel places another transforming dimension in human affairs, one which is not going to be canceled out by war, but in fact grows step by step with the lethal threats of violent meaning.

This is the language of the gospel itself and not a logical, mechanical deduction from history or anthropology. It is a matter of what I might call aionology (pronounce aye-on-ology).

Oh, no, not another “ology” word for Christians to learn, I hear you say! But, yes, I’m afraid it’s so!

I consider aionology essential and urgent for our time. We are generally used to what theology calls “eschatology,” i.e. the end times brought by Christ at his appearing, as a definitive line drawn between this world and the next of “eternal life.” But in the New Testament Jesus has recourse to the concept of “the age” (aion), rather than eternity, something that is consistently misrepresented in the translations. “Aion” or “age” in its literal sense does not abolish time, as eternity does. It basically tells us that there is a radical break expected between the present age and the age to come, meaning that the cosmos is changed radically, but it is still the same essential time-filled sphere of human existence as before.

Sometimes in the New Testament it is almost impossible to avoid the correct translation. A good example is in Luke chapter sixteen and the parable of the dishonest manager. At verse eight the “master complimented the unrighteous manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the sons of this age (aion) are more shrewd in relation to their own kind than the sons of light” (New American Standard Bible). The passage then goes on to tell us to “make friends for yourselves from the Mammon of unrighteousness so that when it gives out they may welcome you into the tents of the Age (aion)” (David Bentley Hart). The clear implication is that there is the present age, and then there is another one, appropriate for a people of light, where they will be welcomed and live in something this-worldly as tents!

The same (“of the age” or plural “for ages”) meaning of aion can be read in the other places where it appears, and it tells us again and again that the continuity of time is not broken by an alien Platonic eternity. And there are other hints in the New Testament that Jesus foresaw a radical renewal of creation rather than a negation of the material realm (viz. Matt 19:28, and Acts 3:21). It does not mean that time will be experienced as it is now—with its subjugation to death, insecurity, violence, war. Rather, precisely, its experience will be liberated from these things, yet still in an enduring material, temporal reality!

This is the horizon of aionology. It was a horizon embraced by the German theologian, Bonhoeffer, but perhaps in an even more radical way. For Bonhoeffer the world had reached a point where it operated without “the working hypothesis” of God. It seems to get along fine on its own without God. But rather than double down on trying to convince people of God, the role of the Christian becomes the same as that of God—to suffer in the world, and with the world, as it struggles to be the world.

I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith… By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In doing so, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world — watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a human being and a Christian. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters from Prison.)

The purpose of this co-suffering is far from masochistic; it is creative and transformative. If God is in the depths of the world in this way, and Christians are with God, it means that the world is being called from its depths to the end of violence, the end of war, the end of hatred . . . to radical change of heart.

It is this that provides the meaning of war for Christians, the poetry of the end of war. Aionology is the meaning of God as a deep undertow, a reversal of everything, and something already going on. It is the melting of the ice caps in a spiritual sense, leaving an ecology where God strips the world of its violent meanings, where the present triumph of generative murder is completely overcome and undone. The material realm is already spiritual. It is itself spirituality presently unrecognized, but destined for final full revelation.

Even so a poetry of the end of war arises by virtue of the age, in which we live, the age given by the gospel.

Note. Initial artwork by Patty Halbeck

RIVER CANTICLE

Poetry

Old gypsy lady Susquehanna, three hundred million years and counting

Older than that holy Nile or Ganges, earth’s oldest water ever spilling

Daughter to the clouds and rainbows, sister to aged Allegheny mountains

Great artery of this America, fountain to a well of years so near to filling

Time must circle back on itself, though first it seems straight like gravity

In such wise the gypsy speaks deceitful tales when in youth she murmurs

Whispering to the rocks of what will come as fate to every camp and city

Rank histories of war upon its banks, floods of old, unrepented murders,

Knowing what all knowing is, but then at last that viscid surface quickens

Casting off its sullen glaze of lies, deep pendulum of ancient slaughter,

Her measure all at once plunges swifter to the sea, the dull motion lightens

A dead history of meandering turns and shifts to this rush of living water

At Columbia, the river town where the gypsy finds her soul and freedom

Where Wright built his cabin and plied his ferry, he was a gospel pacifist

The Quaker sought a different kind of world, an altogether novel idiom,

Grace not guns, his kind of tongue, a destiny of peace here made manifest

Unseen world’s discovery, the dove’s deep forgiving arc circling to descent

At last, by the side of a dazzled flood in this late age’s lingering afternoon

You feel the river urging, blocked and held but pressing on, never quenched

And yet all made new in a continent sore abused will never come too soon

The Susquehannock lived here and if Iroquois, beaver wars, and flintlocks

Did not finish them smallpox and Sunday Paxton boys surely killed them all

Meanwhile rafts laden with flour and coal flowed downstream to the docks

And lumber piled thick as grass on Front Street, a nation’s baptized capital

For the newly rich, but each the fractious prism of the other, this American

Dream, with other chattels too, African slaves and their traumatized exodus

North, crossing here to yet longer exile, a ghetto space amidst Samaritans

While railroads hammered out the rhythm, the sound of industry, iron angelus

Chorded into music by metal strung guitars, ragtime, jazz, blues, rap and rock

Soul memory of exiles, easing pain where it’s impossible to know the river-bed

Until at last water itself sounds alarm, altering tempo to reveal history’s shock

Against life itself, a Susquehanna effect, changing misery for light that’s shed

Everywhere her voice is raised to tell and any man or woman hears her meaning

This song, they feel it, swelling over every hill and scale, this altered frequency

Incense and lavender, heather and thyme, fields of gold and the last harvest season

O portal of the Jordan, where murder is no more, and all is but grain and mercy

Come, come all, to this unknown west, this undiscovered south, where the leaves

Heal each broken skin of every shade, on trees beside a river flowing from a throne

Abyss of love disappearing and resurfacing ever the same, so no creature grieves

For dead oceans of hatred without cease, there is just the swirl of love to atone

Throw wide the gates to the river city, this final Columbia of all our dreams and history

The water seethes with light, angels and martyrs dance forever among its fiery filaments

Shrapnel metamorphic to compassion, its bitter molecules recoded into tender mystery

Transformation is the face of truth, not two-faced being and a dumb parade of elements

Start in the middle always, nel mezzo del cammin, the thick of life’s most urgent story

Here, here with this, this flowing river, and all its quick, bright, swift, and sudden glory

Presence or Pathways

General Theology

We are always in the presence of God. The same gentle steady presence throughout our life. But if you are someone who has made changes in life, and perhaps against the grain, it may be that you think God was not there at certain difficult and painful periods, and certainly not in that gentle way.

There are churches, physical buildings, which proclaim the presence of God. The power of architecture and the beauty of art help underline the claim. Going back to Greek temples these often have spectacular natural settings, overlooking deep valleys, or perched on jutting cliffs, places which combine to create a sense of awe and the sacred. But is any of this the presence of the revealed God of forgiveness and nonviolence?

There was a time I used to visit one of “Christendom’s great churches” to pray. I considered it almost the headquarters of God on earth. And it is true, the prayer chapel had a feeling of strong spirituality. But there came a moment when I felt crushed by the whole place, and I walked out into the sunshine determined to look for God in other, much more unlikely places. Was God with me as I walked out the bronze doors?

This is a question of later years. At the time, I simply took the risk, and believed God was big enough to find me wherever my path might take me.

A concrete choice like this is very much for the sake of the mind, for the sake of mental transformation. It is in fact about what pathways are being followed in the brain, and the possibility of opening new ones so that God may be felt in new ways and in different human spaces. And this did eventually happen to me.

But the question remains because the buildings and temples remain, and they continue to claim emphatically that God is there and draw the pilgrims inside. And, because the issue of buildings is also always about mental pathways, it is just as possible that people will have a fixed abstract concept associated with the building and even though they never step inside.

A church, either an actual building or a sociological organization, is a projection in the world. Inevitably it mirrors the world back to itself. In a superficial separation-of-church-and-state society the church will, by that very concept, say “God is in his heaven, and basically the world is the way it is meant to be. Otherwise, we would not be given and receiving tax privileges and blessing big social occasions.” Other cultures have dealt with churches by making them at most a sentimental keepsake from other times, desirable again for big moments as a romantic backdrop.

But the real “church” as projection in the world is something we carry inside ourselves and in our relationships. People sometimes say I am opposed to churches. But that is not the case. The churches are vital carriers of the gospel tradition. The point is the new situation we are in, not opposition to what has been. The mental pathways of peace and nonviolence are not as such doctrinal distinctions or identifying creedal formulae. Neither are they principles of behavior to pledge us a happy afterlife. They are a living shift in human meaning. A change of our way of being on earth. I have steered away from “doing church,” not because I think church is impossible. On the contrary, all calling people together on the basis of love and forgiveness, that in fact is church. But because we have also seen churches as mechanisms for projecting humanity outside and beyond the earth, then it is necessary to have a period of serious abstinence from the traditional practice of church.

We need continually to develop the mental space and relationships of peace and divine nonviolence as a way of life, in order to get away from the otherworldism of normal Christianity.

This other practice is for the sake of building these new mental pathways, just as a sports coach will do intensive training at the beginning of a season, or before a final tournament. Transformed pathways and projections need concentration and intensity. This is why I prefer study, retreats, focused prayer, alternative ritual and settings etc., to regular “church.”

But what of the presence of God? If you are someone who has made spiritual lifestyle changes you may contrast a sense of God you had before, with what you feel now. God may have been threatening, or simply alien. How do you reconcile that with mental pathways which seem very different now? Was God always with you? Or, is God in fact reducible to purely a mental projection?

No. If God is nonviolent then God is infinitely patient and long-suffering. God does not impose God’s will, not at all. The appearance of God’s rage, losing patience and moving to wipe out his creatures, this is the product of a primitive level of perception where historical divine identity rooted in violence overwhelms revealed identity rooted in liberation. Why would God wish to liberate an oppressed people unless he fundamentally disagreed with violence? And the ultimate outworking of this will to liberate is the willingness to suffer without retaliation in order to draw humanity into the peace and life of nonviolence.

So it is, I believe, that the God of gentleness and peace was always there, no matter our perceptions. Indeed, I think we can progressively take every memory and retrofit them with the nonviolent presence of God in order actively to redeem and transform our past. This is part of changing mental pathways and, in turn, creating the space of a new projection on earth. Not simply an “historic peace church” (and its rooting in a particular denominational identity) but a clear and dominant sense of any Christian gathering as the breakthrough of new humanity.

Canaries, Cages, Covid and Compassion

Anthropo-theology, Movies

The proverbial canary is in its cage. Someone opens the door. The pretty bird steps out, looks around, and goes straight back behind bars.

The liberator’s definition of freedom may look like the end of the world to its feathered beneficiary, even if from the outside the caged canary might seem deprived.

On the other hand, if you make a cage big and rich enough and put lots of canaries and other songbirds in there together, suddenly they produce a society and a culture that has its own definition and assertion. Maybe then the cage becomes a problem to everyone around it, because it is using up so many resources to create its gilded lifestyle, and because, incidentally, the birds make a whole lot of noise. Nevertheless and all the same, the cage continues to deny freedom to its captives.

I once visited a community in Latin America where the rooms of all the brothers were set on a gallery around a central courtyard. Someone had the bright idea of building a huge aviary in the courtyard, reaching from the ground to the roof. The birds were certainly pretty, but the first morning I was there I was awakened by this deafening blast of competing birdsong breaking out at 4.20 am, an atrocious kind of alarm-clock. Needless to say, I got away from that house and its hellish chorus at the first possible opportunity.

Is it possible that aspects of the culture and society of North America are comparable to that exaggerated aviary? North America is very large, it has an idiosyncratic sense of freedom, it makes an ear-splitting noise proclaiming it, and yet in certain respects it is still a cage. Stepping outside the aviary seems like catastrophe to many Americans.

American freedom is built upon a gigantic landmass discovered by Europeans at a point when their technological development was taking off, enabling them rapidly to assert control over the territory, its indigenous peoples, and its resources. The wide-open spaces and the relative swiftness of expansion became a sense of freedom, a phenomenon of effortless power, movement and destiny. Allied to Enlightenment values of equality, individual liberty and rights, the experience was intoxicating and defining. Soon, just behind the gun, the cotton gin, the smelting yard and the railway, came the movie camera. Not only did this freedom express itself concretely in the prairies, the mountains, the rivers, it mirrored itself to itself in an endless stream of films, set against the magnificent backdrop and following the relentless movement of humanity across it.

We also have to bear in mind what this movement of humanity was getting away from. Poverty, landlords, oppression, pogroms, all such was left behind with only the new spaces rolling out in front, “from sea to shining sea.” No wonder all the birds in the aviary sung their hearts out!

But the fact remains that this is a unique and specialized society, spiritually and materially walled off from the rest of the planet and, of course, from aspects and sub-sets of its own territory and peoples. Because no matter the crowing of the cocks and hens true freedom still lies beyond the walls of this self-constructed cage.

Concepts of individual liberty come from specific and privileged circumstances like North America and the English bourgeoisie on the crest of industrial growth and great comparative wealth. In contrast the industrial working classes in Britain and France developed a sense of identity over against the rampant individualism of the factory owners, bankers and financiers. Necessarily this was a class identity, involving the whole mass of workers, combining their power against the might of the individual owners and their top-of-the-crop families.

It is this class identity which came to color what is called “socialism,” and now so offends U.S. sensibilities, pitting a brute, ugly collectivism against the ideal beauty of the individual. The ugly “starling” collectivism is what the canaries sing against day after day, trumpeting their unique private beauty to anyone in earshot.

But the truth remains theirs is not private beauty. As underlined, it was attained and is maintained by public means, in a particular time and space, channeling exceptional privilege to the fortunate citizens within its continental boundaries. Meanwhile, there is another version of beauty and freedom which the canaries can hardly conceive, so hostile are they to what they see as the massed ranks of collective unfreedom. This is a freedom outside of their cage which they reject because they feel happier in their five-star confine.

The freedom outside the cage is created by the power of compassion. To share the life of every other creature in the world, by means of the emotion that makes us one with them even in their suffering, this is to open an endless breadth of human relation. If freedom is the sense of movement and the possibility of engaging it anytime anywhere, then the freedom of compassionate relation is infinite, while the defense of privilege is a cage. The recent politicization over Covid safety demonstrates much of what is at stake. In a recent op-ed in the New York Times Charlie Warzel compared the furor over mandated masks to the politics surrounding gun rights and the human consequences that flow from them.

“As in the gun control debate, public opinion, public health and the public good seem poised to lose out to a select set of personal freedoms. But it’s a child’s two-dimensional view of freedom — one where any suggestion of collective duty and responsibility for others become the chains of tyranny.”

Warzel goes on to say, “In this narrow worldview, freedom has a price, in the form of an “acceptable” number of human lives lost. It’s a price that will be calculated and then set by a select few. The rest of us merely pay it.” This may seem a harsh judgment but explained as the canaries’ addiction to their aviary it makes full sense. Warzel’s assessment was underlined by an editorial piece in the same newspaper on Aug 6, reporting America’s “unique failure” to get the pandemic under national control. “First, the United States has a tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions. That aversion to collective action helped lead to inadequate state lockdowns and inconsistent adherence to mask wearing based on partisanship instead of public health.”

As in gun rights the public health failure of Covid response is not an unfathomable mystery. Guns belong to the technology by which mastery over the Americas was asserted. In the hands of individuals, it provides the cumulative power of a king and army, expressed in a single trigger burst. It provides the individual with the rule of a monarch over an alien and hostile world. L’etat c’est moi! In comparison, Covid is a tiny virus, something which reverses the perspective but maintains the metaphor. Now the power is a minute pathogen set against the Leviathan of the individual. Thus, “It shall not pass,” not because of a humble, other-conscious mask, but purely by royal decree!

What is unique about humans is their limitless power of relation. As Rene Girard has shown us, this can result in unending rivalry, the source of wars and killing. Or, the very same mimetic connection can bring community, compassion and love. In the past this relation has been called “socialism” but there is an inherited element of class conflict in that political tradition, one that makes the canaries sing all the louder in opposition. Compassion, instead, invites everyone into a more deeply human life, one without violence. Indeed, if humans are to survive at all on earth then compassion must become a necessary way of life, rather than an occasional fit of sentiment. Compassion then might be called a “new socialism,” if by that we mean the compassionate elements clearly present in the old tradition now come front and center in a mode of positive human transformation. The current cultural crisis in response to Covid (and, afterward, to its aftermath) throws up the possibility of seeing everything from a revolutionary new angle. Many Americans already share a great sense of compassion. It is simply a matter of making this a human and political virtue in its own right.

The Lamb and the Stone

General Theology, , ,

There is a truth of love which overtakes the heart.

As if someone slid back a panel deep in the basement of the soul, revealing a dark stream which has not seen the light for a billion years. The limpid dark water of divine love. Undertow to the universe.

Girard says there is an originary murder at the basis of humanity.

The location, the spot, the place where the murder occurs—like all associations, in sound, equipment, time—becomes sacred. There is a sense of power, fear, awe about them—the phenomenon of the sacred.

Later, when humans turn to building, it occurs to them spontaneously to make the foundation stone of a building or wall sacred—by carrying out a foundation murder or sacrifice. That way it will have numinous strength. So, we find the countless foundation sacrifices of human culture: the bones of birds. animals, children, adults, are found beneath walls, towers, corners, hearths, doorsills.  . . . from India to Mexico, from Saxon England to North Africa.

Rozafa Castle Foundation Sacrifice

The stunning visual of Rozafa castle in Albania spells out the story in one. The legend tells of three laborers building the castle wall. Despite their best efforts each night the wall would collapse; a wise man counseled them that only the sacrifice of one of the builders’ wives, mortared within the wall, would keep it strong; the wife of the youngest (of course) was chosen and she accepted her fate, but on one condition; one eye, one breast, one leg had to be left exposed in order to suckle and dandle her infant; the rest could be walled up. And so it is, the castle stands strong to this day. (The story was told to me in class by an Albanian student, while I was teaching on the foundational victim. The whole legend is in fact a classic, culturally Christian foundation story—the victim is half-revealed in a factual sense, half-revered in a superstitious sense, a kind of half-effective double transference.)

The foundation stone is sacred by virtue of the killing, by virtue of the blood, but it is the stone which becomes important for humans. The wall must stay strong. The city must endure. It is the stone which creates enclaves and houses, castles and civilizations. It is almost inconceivable for human beings to make things without the stone. The stone absorbs the life and blood of the victim. These things remain hidden in the stone. The stone stands forth strong and noble in its own right

Except, that is, until the Lamb.

The Lamb of Revelation appears in the world “as one who was slaughtered,” making plain the murdered creature by which the stone is made strong. The Lamb refuses to pour out its blood for the sake of the stone. Instead it reveals the truth of spilled blood, in its case given for and as love, but, because it is revelation, in the same moment it makes the stone weak and unstable.

This is not a happy situation for the world, and by orders of intensity. Its most treasured, original artifact—the stone—is subverted in its essential being and function. The modern world is rendered unstable at its core. You could say a nuclear reactor is simply the modern technological realization of the instability at the core of our human-spiritual condition.

But, not to worry, we still have fundamentalist Christianity! Fundamentalists repeat language of the blood, but it’s the stone they’re really interested in. By dint of a thousand years of atonement theology they have turned the thing upside down. Rather than revelation, they see the blood of the Lamb as warranting and supporting the stone. Because the blood is offered in compensation to a wrathful God, the figure of “God” becomes the apex agent of violence, a meaning that enshrines and exceeds all the violence of the world. God becomes the stone in the sky about to fall on us. Some indeed might readily admit this, because in their minds it seems like the honor and respect due to God (God can do what God likes), but it is just another version of the stone. The symbolism or conceptual place where the violent way of the world comes together most powerfully is always the stone, the foundation of the world. 

Liberal thinking doesn’t think this way. In fact, it doesn’t mind being considered irreligious: rather it takes the side of the victim and that is where its righteousness lies. Its approach seems, by definition, to be free of blood, and so it is necessarily non-foundational and righteous. But the moment it gathers in a crowd (including virtual) to stake out its position, to accuse, condemn and cancel the victim-maker, we are inevitably producing the stone on that side too. This is because humanity has not changed its core relation with violence, its generative anthropology, its root way of being. Without this radical change the intensity of liberalism’s desire to found the world on principles of justice and inclusivity will only produce a new round of the same old sacred. More subtle and diffuse perhaps, and enshrined above all in language—in staking out territory in symbolic, semiotic terms—it is nevertheless just as ferociously constructed of “stones” as any fortress. The “right side of history” can so easily mean a new sacred space, where stones are thrown, and the foundation stone laid down all over again.

The blood of the Lamb undermines all foundation stones, crying out only for nonviolence, mercy, forgiveness, and love. That is why it is so endlessly disruptive. Fundamentalist Christians are the reaction of violent history, seeking to restore the foundation stone within the very message that dissolves it. But because of the very nature of the blood of the Lamb, revealing the victim, fundamentalism is always itself destabilized. Proof of this is its central need for its own form of victim language. Abortion is right-wing Christianity’s preferred and only victim. The fetus in the womb appears separate from the conflicts and violence of adult human mimesis, so to insist on protecting this life, while forgetting all other issues of life under threat, makes for a privileged language that stops short of all other killings. But all along right-wing Christianity’s insistence on this issue shows that it shares a common worldview of the victim—while all the time seeking desperately to refound society on the stone covered with its blood. This kind of Christianity is inherently conflicted, angered, angry and unhappy, by virtue of its own core symbolism and meaning.

The bible ends with the book of Revelation, and the book of Revelation ends with a vision of the heavenly city coming to earth. The city is the city of the Lamb, but it comes “from heaven” and therefore is not founded on the originary violence at the root of our humanity. The blood of the lamb is a totally different blood, communicating only endless forgiveness and love. The New Jerusalem is made up of a vast number of stones, described in luminous detail in chapter twenty one . The city itself can itself be viewed as one huge stone, a perfect cube twelve thousand stadia long at each equal edge. But, again, this is not the stone of human culture. It is a completely different kind of stone, shot through with light. There is no violence or falsehood in the city, thus requiring no foundation to keep things in order. Only the totally nonviolent meaning of the blood of the Lamb, recreating human relation as such, is able to do this.

Image by Patty Halbeck

By and large throughout its history Christianity has missed this recreating relation in the blood of the Lamb. But our global humanity is today at a moment of crisis when it desperately needs it. How can the world founded on the stone of violence experience the nonviolent stone of the Heavenly Jerusalem? Every Christian carries it within her! It is a kind of half-light or dawn of the Lamb brought into the world by every breath of the Christian. A Christian is defined by relation with the Lamb, the relation of the Lamb, in forgiveness and compassion. The Christian is this relation.

When I slid back that panel in the basement of the soul I think what I saw there is really the energy of the Lamb coursing through history, through the universe. It is unstoppable, unquenchable, a way of being in its own right, unbeholden to mimesis either right or left. It is at the root of all things, in these latter days manifest in the world by proclamation of the Lamb.

Heart Attack!

Anthropo-theology, Poetry

It’s just about a year since a heart-attack knocked me off my CASUAL perch (Carelessly Assured Serenely Uninterrupted Animate Life). A single year, I suppose, is not a whole lot of time for a commemoration, but the fact of my survival, and the alternative, make it seem a whole lot of lifetimes. All those little things that happen in everyday existence, all the hopes and dreams that continue to swirl inside your head and make life so much, well, life, none of that would exist at all for the last year if I had made my exit. How precious then is that space of time, how much worthy of a celebration!

Human body with heart, with aorta ventricle, left atrium, right atrium, superior vena cava, inferior vena cava and artery, on black background.
Human body with heart, with aorta ventricle, left atrium, right atrium, superior vena cava, inferior vena cava and artery

Besides, I also completed my thirty-six sessions of cardiac rehab, becoming part of a select community of similarly aged men, plus (for some reason) a lesser number of women, all recently made conscious of their acute fragility this side of eternity. We had such a huge sense of something in common, as we hit the treadmills and exercise bikes, that we continually talked about going out for beer and pizza together. But when it came to it, we couldn’t bring ourselves. I suspect it would have felt too much like a reunion of ghosts at the local funeral parlor!

So, instead, I will try to celebrate by writing something rising from the experience and I would never have thought of before: a dialogue between a man and his own heart. You see, you never think of your heart as separate from yourself, until gnaws in your chest like a wild dog trying madly to get out. That’s when you realize that the heart is a muscle with a life of its own, and you really have to start paying attention to it.

Oh, my dear heart, what did I ever do to you for you to treat me this way?

You never cared before, you took me entirely for granted!

But how was I to know? You were so quiet and gentle, always there day and night, with your peaceful little beat, you made me take you for granted! How was I to know you could get so angry? pexels-photo-1820510

Give me a break! You were always saying creepy things like “Cross your heart and hope to die!” “Eat your heart out!” “I heart you!” You knew exactly how important I was. But it never occurred to you to figure out what really made me tick? If you had a muscle strain in your leg or arm you would talk about it non-stop. But the most serious muscle in your body, you thought I worked by magic.

C’mon now. Calm down. You’re taking it all too much to heart!  (Sorry, I thought that was funny!) I was always talking about you, and in a positive way! We always said, “Follow your heart,” “The heart has its reasons which reason doesn’t have.”  All that cool romantic stuff! You had to be pleased!

Yes, and what about, “The heart is devious above all else, it is perverse,” All that Jeremiah stuff! I would get so sick and tired hearing about how wicked I was. Bad heart

Well, yes, there is that. But you have to admit, you did lead me astray a number of times

Whaattt! It was nothing to do with me, it was you with your sick imagination, I’m just a supply of motion to the propeller, it’s you and your precious brain that steers the ship!

So, you’re totally innocent. You’ve never done anything wrong?

No, I have not. I am innocent, and you are a jerk.

Listen, you’re being far too literal about everything. When we say “heart” in casual conversation we’re using a metaphor for the deepest, most essential part of the self. We’re not talking about you, that eleven-ounce muscle about the size of an average fist lodged in our chest. You have to make allowance for human language use.

So, now I’m too stupid to understand when people are talking about me, and when they mean something else. Well, let me tell you, you don’t have a word for that something else, because you don’t know what it is. But in the meantime, the truth is I AM the most essential thing in your life, I am the main event, but you don’t give me the respect you should. That whole metaphor thing is your way of wriggling out of the facts

But you just said it was my brain that made me do stuff, and now you say you really are the mainspring of life. Which is it?

I’m not arguing the point with you. You started the whole conversation because you said I’d treated you poorly. The fact is you didn’t know what I do, and now when I showed you, you come on like I’m behaving badly. But, really, I’ve always been that way, the passion of your life at its core, and you’ve been totally fine with it. I just gave you a wake-up call and now you have to change your whole way of understanding. lionYou have a lion of desire where you thought there was a sweet little puppy, and, more to the point, the lion’s no longer locked up in its cage.

That’s crazy, really crazy. I’m not sure I want to be talking to you like this. You suddenly become this lion all untamed, and about to tear itself free from me, but somehow you always were that way, and now it’s too late for me to do anything about it! What happened to “sweetheart,” to compassion, to the heart’s heart for the weak and wounded!

There you go again, saying stuff about me for things you actually can’t make sense of. Well, I would like to help you, I really would. And maybe I will feel better about it next week, or next year. But in the meantime, I have got your attention and that makes me happy. I’m just a muscle, like you say, and my operating life has a term limit, what do you say, a shelf life? All that other stuff you talk about, you’ll have to figure that out without me.

Well, that does make sense. I do see what you mean about my sloppy metaphors, making you responsible for things which we don’t have names for. So, what happens to those things when your angry lion does finally break free? Where will my real “heart” be then? sun heart

I guess you’ll have to wait and see. Maybe, if you get the chance, you could even let me know too!