A Mini Biography - A Soul's Journey

I fell in love with history in college. I particularly loved biographies.  I think this goes back to my time in elementary school when I was mesmerized by biographies of wild western outlaws. I love trying to figure out what makes people tic.

Coming from a broken family I had this gnawing need to understand why people suck, why people are cruel, why people are mean, self-centered – just why they are so bloody screwed up.

When my parents began to drift apart there was this incredible tension in our house on a daily basis. I felt this tension in the marrow of my bones. I carried it around like a thousand-pound weight. Finally, my dad moved out, and my mother went into this depression that filled the air of our house with a toxicity that could choke an elephant. I ingested this toxicity like secondhand smoke.

I remember in her desperation to find some meaning, some relief from her pain, my mother sought answers wherever she could. I recall an astrology book she bought. I wasn’t familiar with it, but I sensed that she was searching. Then, with the ‘miracle’ of television she began listening to religious stations. One of these early shows was the 700 Club, with himself, Pat Robertson becoming a dominating voice in my mothers consciousness. My mother had found her Mecca. Our domestic milieu changed almost overnight. Religion, a social obligation up to this point, became the load star in our house.

It was around the time I was in eighth or ninth grade that this happened. I was dragged to a variety of different evangelical, charismatic extravaganzas, with people talking in strange and alien voices in a cacophony of chaotic orgasmic spiritual ecstasies. At first, I thought I was with people from different countries, but soon learned that this was called ‘talking in tongues’. While this adventure was not of my choosing, I desperately wanted my mother to be happy. I needed an escape from the dungeon of her depression. So, I gave my will over to accepting this new reality in my life. 

Then, one day one of my tennis coaches told my mother about this charismatic church. We began to attend on a regular basis. I met a girl, and I met a really cool dude with hair to his ass. He is still a friend, and thankfully, free from that religous world. We attended this church until my mother heard the voices of a more ‘authentic’ Christianity. It is popularly called the prosperity gospel movement. So, off we went to another church. Overall, I think there were four or five different ones until my mother finally found a church she could believe in.

Then, turning eighteen I was, by American tradition, to leave the nest and go to college. I was such a terrible high school student I had no idea what college would take me, or what the hell I was going to study, or what the hell I was going to do with my life. So, I applied and got accepted to the University of Kansas. I found a place of residence with what was called the Campus Christian House. That is a whole different story. I only lasted a semester. I basically flunked out. I had no clue what the hell the professors were going on about.

So, I moved back into my mother’s house, not an experience an eighteen-year-old is comfortable with. I got menial jobs, and I hated my life. What the hell was I going to do with my life? This question was both my own and my mother’s. Because I had come to accept my mother’s religious worldview, I thought, well, how about becoming a minister in this religion. Hell, most of these cats don’t have a formal education, just up my ally. Then there presented itself a school in Oklahoma. Broken Arrow to be exact. Kenneth Hagin, the godfather of the name-it-claim-crowd, had started a school to train those interested in Christian capitalism (my later interpretation). So, packing my bags, with a send off from a thrilled mother, I set off to Oklahoma. For the next two years I sat in classes that I now would describe as nothing short of cultish. Famous personalities graced our school. Oral Roberts was there a number of times. Republican stalwarts came to hype our dear leader, Kenneth.

In one of my classes (I decided to concentrate in youth ministry – I was young, so it seemed to fit), for some inexplicable reason during a practice sermon, I quoted Karl Marx. I didn’t know Karl Marx from Groucho Marx, but I guess I had read something that mentioned him. In the critique afterwards I was put under suspicion. I got a little bit of a reputation of being an ‘intellectual’ (an irony that my high school teachers would faint laughing at). This was a death sentence. The school was a two-year affair. By the end of my second year I had lost absolutely any interest in either becoming a minister, or even going to church anymore.

So, I moved back to my mother’s house, and that pesky question again – what the hell was I going to do with my life. I went back to college.

Before I moved back from Oklahoma, I did one semester at the Tulsa Community College. I took a class that would change the direction of my life. It was a history class. The professor was so interesting that I began to fall in love with history. So, I decided to become a secondary education major, in order to become a high school history teacher. At the end of the semester, I ran out of money, so I moved back to Kansas City. Again, moving back in with your mother at any age after eighteen is, in a word, tortuous. Added to this was my utter disdain for her religion. But I had to play the game, make her believe I was going to church (I would leave each Sunday morning and go to the lake and either sleep in my car, or read a book, then go home when I knew she was at church). This went on for a couple of years. All the while I was living a life that she most definitely would not approve. As I tell my students, I was a decent Protestant, I am an ok Catholic, but I was a fabulous heathen.

When I left the charismatic, prosperity cult, I was completely ostracized, excluded, from those I had built relationships with. I was now a heretic, an apostate, going to hell, you name it. I was told by a previous girlfriend’s father that I needed an exorcism. I came to hate religion and religious people. The story of my journey to Catholicism is another story, another time. But, while I hated religion, I was desperately hungry for meaning, for purpose, for something bigger. I hadn’t really lost faith in the existence of God; I just really didn’t like God. My images of God were filled with anger, exclusion, revenge, pettiness, etc. I feared this God. I did all in my power not to think about God. I knew I was going to hell, and I just didn’t want to dwell on it. 

It has taken me years – and the journey isn’t over – to try to exorcise this demon God from my consciousness and emotions. I still feel this demon arise in my weak moments of self-doubt and guilt. It has formed in me an automatic dislike of those who represent this demon. Thus, I can be easily set off when I read something about or by those who serve this demon. My natural default is to demonize them, exclude them. But I know that the true God is not such a demonizer, excluder. I so very much want to be more like the God I have come to cognitively believe in, but I have to struggle with years of conditioning. It is difficult. Thus, the journey continues.

Pride or Envy, Which Came First?

In his essay, ‘Naming the Demon’: The Structure of Evil in Lonergan and Girard’, John Dadosky writes that in a previous article in which he engaged the theme of mimetic theory, he states that in referring

to the work of one of Girard's followers, James Alison, on the hermeneutics of the Fall, I raised questions about the nature of original sin as envy, something which Alison argues. In contrast, I agreed with Aquinas' emphasis on the role of pride not only with the first parents, but with the fallen angels as well. I concluded that while mimetic theorists with their emphasis on envy have overlooked the role of pride at the heart of human sin and violence, their insights are helpful in clarifying a mimetic component to the sin of pride. Hence, one can speak of horizontal mimetic appropriation (envy) directed towards human beings by other human beings and vertical mimetic appropriation (pride), the desire to be more than one's nature, that is, the desire of human beings to be like God.

I find a particular flaw in Dadosky’s argument, that being his use of a biblical myth of origins that came to fruition thousands of years after humans had developed highly sophisticated civilizations and symbol systems. The story of the fall in the second chapter of Genesis was the creation of what has been deemed the J source, probably originally orally transmitted until written in its present form around the 7^th century BCE. The evolutionary appearance of Homo sapiens occurred approximately half a million years ago, while the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens emerged some 100,000 to 32,000 years ago. In the Girardian schema, it was the increase in mimesis that influenced this evolutionary emergence of a specifically human consciousness.

With the emergence of mimetically influenced self-consciousness, in its very primitive archaic incarnation, the symbology that is necessary for such self-regard that is required to produce constructs, or self-images of pride seems to me a bit of a stretch. Ethnologists assure us that even though fido the dog, or mittens the cat seem to display human emotions, the reality is that they only possess emotions at most the level of a two and a half human child, whereas complex human emotions like pride do not begin to manifest until after the age of 3. Thus, any projection of seeming pride is an act of anthropomorphizing by the pet’s proud master.

Girard’s theory of hominization claims that what brought about human consciousness was the increase in mimesis, the facility to imitate the actions and intentions of others. Imitating the intentions of others gave rise to the possibility of conflict because of the growing desire to possess what the model of one’s desires possessed. This, in turn, indicates that emotions of envy arise from mimetic desiring. Pride, it seems to me, arises after human communities establish roles of differentiation, which in turn gives rise to mental and emotional images of comparison. Attitudes of superiority, a sense of being better, more talented, higher status, etc., indicating the possibility of pride, both in its positive and negative connotation, cannot occur prior to self-aware differentiation.

The biblical account depicts a situation in which the human couple were tempted to grasp beyond their station, becoming their own self-creation, a delusion that is real in human consciousness. But such a consciousness is not possible before the demarcations that come with (specifically) human socialization.

Thus, in contradistinction to Dadosky’s argument, I would maintain with many Girardians that envy has precedence in the development of human self-consciousness and social development. Only later did there develop the complex human emotional and ideological construct of pride. Where I think Dadosky misses it here is that he does not sufficiently take into account the dynamics of human evolution and has misplaced a complex mythic narrative as being a more faithful depiction of the development of human evolution.

Social Media and the Temptation of Catharsis

 

Many different types of Christians have found social media a convenient place of catharsis. Catharsis, a purificatory act that helps to dispel the impurities of rage, anger, hatred, vengeance, and so forth. I confess, I find myself giving into the temptation of seeking a catharsis for these types of emotions that arise in my frustrations over ideas and behaviors I find dissonant with my Christian convictions or discordant with my own world view.

Scrolling through Twitter is a clinical study in catharsis. While Facebook can be such a study, there is a tendency for Facebook users to create silos of common minded individuals whose likes for each other’s posts can further entrenchment into a common ideology or world view. With Twitter one can follow just about anyone since there is no need to ask for access through friend requests.

One of the surface perceptions one comes away with in reading the various political/religious allegiances is the rhetoric of difference. Each side claims the high ground, moral superiority, doctrinal verity, superior righteousness, and greater allegiance to the ‘truth’ however that is interpreted. Each post’s declarations, be they announcements of judgment against the ‘other side’, or a ‘planting of a flag’ – this I believe, and can do no other, so help me God – eliciting from the ‘other side’ a response. In many cases these responses will act for the individual posting as a form of catharsis, a releasing of negative emotional energy, and granting a sense of legitimization, a declaration of difference, ‘my vision, my worldview, my truth is now vindicated as I destroy your ignorance, stupidity, absurdity, etc., etc.’

In these exchanges there is most likely a conviction and a hope that if one’s reasoning, one’s arguments, one’s rhetoric is more rational, more intelligent, there will be a conversion to the ‘right side/my side’ by the intransigent idiot on the other side of the screen. I have yet, so far, seen this happen. I could have missed one or two conversions, but in my time on social media it has not stuck out in my observation.

The act of rhetorical differentiation covers over a reality that neither side of the ideological divide can see. In these verbal exchanges is the creation of twins. Each is becoming like the other in their inner psychological and emotional selves. This twinning is the mirroring of self-righteousness, anger, a sense of superiority, being right, a desire for the vanquishing of the other (in the other’s submission to MY ideology), a need for revenge when there is a feeling of slight or denigration. The list can go on.

Until opponents recognize the fact that the oppositional ‘other’ will most likely not be converted through such methods and arguments, nothing will ultimately be resolved. These tit-for-tats only increase animosity and conflict. And animosity and conflict are increased through mimetic mirroring, both in its negative form – I will act in the opposite way from my enemy (the enemy being the model motivating such behavior) – and in the mimetic contagion that comes from other like-minded people who support one side or the other. This contagion is like any other form of contagion, the more people involved, the more it spreads and increases its intensity.

The remedy for these types of conflictual animosities is not scapegoating, that is, claiming the other is the cause of all the problems I believe there to be from my particular ideology/worldview. The remedy is found, at least for Christians, in imitating Christ, whose life and teachings of non-violence compelled him not to dehumanize the other, to write them off. Note that while he had disagreements with the Pharisees, he still ate dinner with them. He did not demonize or dehumanize those opposed to him, but he did challenge their behavior, how they treated the ‘other’, especially the marginalized other. Somehow, we must learn to dialogue in an attitude of humility, respect, and hospitality. This calls for each of us to a greater self-awareness, a recognition that we each need a more profound conversion, a metanoia. And I confess, I wrote this for myself.

Girard, the Eucharist, and Priesthood

If Girard’s theory concerning the scapegoat mechanism, and its founding of human culture, is correct, a question arises: what is happening at the celebration of the eucharist, and what is the point of priesthood?

Girard uncovered the insipient lie found in archaic myths in which the innocence of the surrogate victim was obfuscated by claiming the victim’s guilt for social disorder. The mythic coverup apotheosized the criminal into a divine figure whose sacrifice brought forth order and harmony. In time there formed the mimetic repetition of this originary sacrifice/murder/lynching through rituals meant to replicate the initial sacrifice. Unanimous belief in the efficacy of these rituals and sacrifices brought about a renewal of order and harmony. What was hidden in these rituals and their perceived power was the reality of the innocent victim. From this coverup came the fundaments of human culture built on the violent sacred.

Many theologies in the Christian tradition have explicated this tradition of the killing of a supposed guilty victim (he who became sin for us), and whose death became just another in the long tradition of the violent sacred.

But, as Girard discovered, the lynching of Jesus exposed the victimage mechanism, uncovering the actual locale of social violence, that being in the human community itself. So then, if the eucharist is not a perpetuation of the violent sacred, the re-covering of the lie of guilty victimage, then how are Catholics, and those liturgical traditions who celebrate the eucharist, to understand what is happening in the Mass/Eucharistic celebration?

From a Girardian view, as I understand it, and believe it, the Mass is the celebration of the sacrifice of the innocent one who manifests the absolute self-giving of the non-violent, true, sacred – the God of absolute and eternal love and graciousness. It is a ritual exposition of human personal and social violence, and the need to own the origins of this violence. It is the ritual manifestation of the possibility of a new social order, founded on a new, non-appropriating, non-conflictual mimesis. The priest is the one who has been called from a community – a community whose very being is to be a witness to this loving non-violent God – to officiate and pronounce in constant repetition the words and symbolic gestures of the life giving words and loving actions of Jesus, who revealed to humanity a God who is, and has never been, complicit with any form of conflictual appropriation due to acquisitive mimesis.

Is the eucharistic celebration a sacrifice? Yes and no. No, not in the order of the violent sacred that hides the culpability of the lynchers. Yes, in that God in Christ sacrificed himself, his comfort, his dignity, his power, and his very divinity, in order to give to humanity a new way of being – a being brought forth, or recovered, into a creature of gracious willing acceptance of the gracious kenotic offer from the non-violent, self-giving creator.

Willing and Willfulness

Appetites are born of lack. Natural appetites give notice that biological needs are present and require fulfilment. This is a daily, hourly, even moment by moment experience in our lives. The need to fill these biological appetites motivates biological life to seek the resources to satiate the pressing needs for biological sustainability. There is nothing very revelatory in this natural reality.

But the reality of lack is not confined to biological needs. As social creatures with self-awareness, there are aspects of our existence as social beings that are not easily fulfilled because we no longer have the instinctual guide to aid us in knowing what it is we need to fulfill these non-biological needs and desires.

The nature of creaturehood is the experience of lack. We need others in order to become a self. We need love, affirmation, a sense of belonging, etc. We cannot manufacture – self-create – these things in ourselves because we are constitutionally relational. The problem we face is the fact that every one of us depends upon an ‘other’ who also lacks. In one sense, we are like school children thrown into a courtyard of other children who are to be our teachers, our guides to filling the empty spaces of our selfhood. The blind leading the blind.

A fact of nature is the limitation of resources. Because of this, animals must seek and acquire resources that, due to their limitation, easily leads to competition. There results a habituation and orientation to conflict, a grasping of resources from the hands of others who also mimic this grasping. Battles ensue among and between different species. In like manner humans, in their struggle for the resources needed to bring about a sense of selfhood and wellbeing utilize the canalized compunction of grasping for the perceived resources that will bring about a sustainable self. The will is formed in this mold of grasping, what Gerald May calls willfulness – the imposition of one’s will onto the world. It is a demand that the world give to the self what the self believes will fill the felt lack. May writes in Will and Spirit,

…willfulness is the setting of oneself apart from the fundamental essence of life in an attempt to master, direct, control, or otherwise manipulate existence. More simply, willingness is saying yes to the mystery of being alive in each moment. Willfulness is saying no, or perhaps more commonly, “Yes, but…”

Theologically, it is this willfulness that correlates to the Christian doctrine of original sin. The Edenic myth narrates this grasping for divinity in order to achieve a form of self-creation, forming a willfulness bound to frustration as humans are incapable of self-sustainability due to the lack of resources from their finite reality. Only the infinite contains such resources. But in contradistinction to the formation of human willfulness, a congenital compunction to grasp for desired resources, the infinite divine who is the source of all creation, is not structured in a willful grasping, a conflictual ontology that arises from lack. Rather, the infinite divine is constitutively loving, self-giving, gracious, and willing. This is the revelation of the God-man, whose very being is constitutionally self-giving, kenotic, having no need to act in a grasping, conflictual manner.

It is to this new ontology, this new humanity, that we are called into, a grace filled call that has no complicity with willfulness. We are free to accept a new way of being in the world, with each other, and we are free to reject it. Rejection is complicity with conflict, violence, because the old ontology, the old wineskin, is structured and grounded in the illusion of self-creation, in grasping, in willfulness, in conflict, in violence. Salvation is a call to an ontology of willingness, an openness to receive graciously, with gratitude.

It is our choice – to be willful, or to be willing.

Francis of Assisi and Sister Death

 

A few years ago I was asked to give a reflection at the celebration of St. Francis’ transitus into eternal life. As I reflected on what I wanted to say, I recalled Francis’ line in the Canticle of the Creatures in which he says,

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,
From whose embrace no mortal can escape.
How dreadful for those who die in sin!
How lovely for those found in Your Most Holy Will.
The second death can do them no harm.
Praise and bless my Lord, and give him thanks,
And serve him with great humility.

Whenever I read this portion of the Canticle, I was less then convinced that sister death was in fact my sister. I related to the congregation how I had experienced my mother’s death, how angry at God I was that she was taken from us. A few days after she died, I went to my favorite place at the lake near where I grew up. I railed against God, cried, and just felt so empty.

A told the congregation how I could not see death as a positive, because it was so ugly in my experience. I found death to be a violent reality that hides around the corners of our lives. While we don’t always have it in our immediate vision, it is always there in some form or fashion. It manifests in the many conflicts we experience, bringing about a death to relationships. It lurks in the shadows of our hopes and vanities, bringing a temporality to our dreams and our fantasies. All our strivings – to love, to reconcile, to forgive, to risk, to start again – all fall in the end to the violence of death.

It is the violence of death that has not only haunted humanity for millennia but has been the foundation of social and cultural structures meant to keep the specter of violent death at bay. Rules and regulations, prohibitions, taboos, conventions, and mores have grown from the seeds of human violence. Archaic religion originates from this violence. From this blossomed a vision of the divine that participated in this violence. In time death became a doorway to judgment. The gods would balance the acts and intentions of our lives, and if found wanting, we would find ourselves condemned for all eternity, and in some belief systems, tortured. Death truly became something to fear, God truly someone to fear.

But Rene Girard, and those who have been illuminated by his insights, have come to see that this god of fear and retribution is in fact one of human construction. It is the projection of our own vengefulness onto a divine absolute. But the God of Jesus Christ is not this god. Jesus came to reveal to the world a God of love, WHO IS LOVE, who seeks to reconcile us through love, who welcomes us with open arms into his paradisal graced infused compassion. Once I began to see this, I began to see that death has indeed lost its sting, its power to terrify, its violence. But, like Francis who, being a man of his religious culture, there remains fragments of the violent deity of human construction in the recesses of my emotional makeup. The god of vengeance I learned to imagine as a child awakens in those moments when I have done or thought something that induces guilt. The remenents of this god makes its appearance at times in the life and writings of Francis as seen in this line of the canticle: 

How lovely for those found in Your Most Holy Will.
The second death can do them no harm.

The god of vengeance, of retribution, infiltrates aspects of his vision. Despite this, his intuition that the God of love awaited the beloved gave him the assurance that death was not the final act of a life filled with threats of violence and vengeance. Love is the end and the beginning. Death, our sister, beckons us to the cosmic courts of love.

The Power to Serve (Mark 10:35-45)

Social and cultural constructions of power, while taking different outward forms, tend to conform to an inner dynamic that is similar despite differences in social makeup or historical locale. Underlying motives for the acquisition of power are universal identity needs that unconsciously influence human striving and behavior. The compunction for an increase in control and power are psychologically grounded in the human need to belong, to fit in, to connect to social others. Control and power over one’s environment increase a sense of security – bringing a sense of order to the arbitrariness of life’s many dangers, either among one’s kin, or the larger social arena. How these identity needs are sufficiently met is dependent upon perceived cultural values. In an honor/shame society, the satisfactory acquisition of identity needs was measured by the successful acquisition of higher levels of honor.

In first-century Palestine, the social group was the source and foundation of personal identity. While aspects of what we call individualism was not unknown, group conformity was much more highly valued than our contemporary western desire for uniqueness and singularity. The Jews at this time had developed a religious imagination in which God had specially chosen their people from among all others as a chosen race, a royal priesthood. In their tradition God would eventually set them over the nations as judges and rulers. The kingdom of God would be managed by those who knew the will of God. While this ideal was adopted by Christians, it missed a very important anthropological reality. Human culture arose from violence, from murder, from scapegoating. Social and cultural structures developed from this reality which incorporated prohibitions that were meant to contain the violence that arises from conflictual mimesis. Power structures in the form of hierarchy and differentiation became prescribed through conventions, taboos, mores, and apodictic commands enforced through threats of punishment.

As the sons of Zebedee sought positions of power, symbolized by the positions near the throne of Christ, Jesus had to penetrate a false conceptualization of power that rooted itself in practices of domination. Worldly power tends towards a form of domination that compels compliance through force, many times oppressive, even deadly, force. This type of power is grounded in the violent sacred, in which the deviant, the marginal one, the subaltern must be brought to heel through violent means, either exile or death. Rene Girard writes, “we come to see that the lesson of the Bible is precisely that the culture born of violence must return to violence” (TH 148). The power that Jesus spoke of had no track with this form of coercive power. His was, and is, a power of service, a service that stives to bring about the well-being of the other, even the enemy other, the ethnic, religious, political other. This form of service does not arise from cooperation with the violent sacred, but descends from the overflowing fountain of non-violent, non-oppressive love. The Christian’s vocation is one of service; service to the will of a non-violent God who does not exile or execute in order to maintain a tenuous and violent order, one that can only elicit terror and fear-based submission. Girard writes,

Jesus invites all men to devote themselves to the project of getting rid of violence, a project conceived with reference to the true nature of violence, taking into account the illusions it fosters, the methods by which it gains ground, and all the laws that we have verified over the course of these discussions. Violence is the enslavement of a pervasive lie; it imposes upon men a falsified vision not only of God but also of everything else. And that is indeed why it is a closed kingdom. Escaping from violence is escaping from this kingdom into another kingdom, whose existence the majority of people do not even suspect. This is the Kingdom of love, which is also the domain of the true God, the Father of Jesus, of whom the prisoners of violence cannot even conceive. (TH 197)

Genesis 1: A Corrective to a Violent Deity

In his essay ‘Created in the Image of a Violent God?: The Ethical Problem of the Conquest of Chaos in Biblical Creation Texts’, J. Richard Middleton writes,

In addressing this question, readers of Scripture as canon ought to face squarely not only the presence of cosmogonic conflict in those texts where it genuinely occurs, but also the overwhelming violence that pervades the Bible—from the holy wars of Israel against the Canaanites (at God's command), through the plethora of violent incidents attributed either to God or to God's people in the historical books. Moreover the widespread patriarchal social structure that underlies the biblical text certainly constitutes a form of systemic violence against women. 

Nevertheless, while admitting the presence of much that is ethically problematic in the pages of Scripture (including cosmogonic conflict), I propose that we take seriously the canonical placement of Gen 1 as the prologue or preface to the biblical canon. Even Levenson, despite his tendency to claim that the Chaoskampf is the standard biblical way of depicting God's sovereignty, is constrained to admit that the Gen 1 creation account (which does not contain cosmogonic conflict) "now serves as the overture to the entire Bible, dramatically relativizing the other cosmogonies." 

But the creation account of Gen 1 does not just relativize the creation-by-combat motif. Rather, by its alternative depiction of God's non-violent creative power at the start of the biblical canon, Gen 1 signals the Creator's original intent for shalom and blessing at the outset of human history, prior to the rise of human (or divine) violence. As the opening canonical disclosure of God for readers of Scripture, Gen 1 constitutes a normative framework by which we may judge all the violence that pervades the rest of the Bible. 

If the portrayal of God's exercise of non-violent creative power in Gen 1 is taken in conjunction with its claim that humanity is made in the image of this God, this has significant implications for contemporary ethics. This opening canonical disclosure of God and humanity constitutes, not only a normative framework for interpreting the rest of Scripture, but also a paradigm or model for exercising of human power in the midst of a world filled with violence. 

The text of Genesis 1 is a rather late edition to the Hebrew corpus. Thus, a good deal of time had elapsed in Hebrew/Jewish history. The author was able to reflect on the theological ramifications of his people’s historical experiences. The influence and borrowing from surrounding Canaanite and other cultural religious myths is evident in many passages of the Hebrew texts, while at the same time the author of Genesis 1 came to recognize a profound contrast between the nature of the Hebrew God from the various deities depicted in pagan stories of origins. The foundational structures of the cosmos in these various myths were constructed on the bedrock of violence, as exampled in the Enuma Elish, in which the universe is formed from the violently mutilated corps of Tiamat by the agonistic Marduk.

So, why the God of combat in many other sections of the Hebrew Bible? This, I believe is an example of how the authors of the various texts of the scriptures candidly narrated the cultural mindset held by themselves and ancient Hebrews who were trapped in the cycle of the violent sacred. While Girard notes passages in which the revelation of the non-violent God shone through, a good deal of the Hebrew scriptures reflects the cultural propagation of the scapegoat mechanism, in which the god of wrath was the author and the legitimization for acts of militaristic violence against ethnic others. Genesis 1, as Middleton's insights make clear, is a light that shines a hermeneutical illumination on the true nature of the divine, as non-violent, which in turns helps us to better exegete those passages that are problematic due to their violent suggestions of a wrath filled deity.

Embodied Idolatry - An Excerpt

An excerpt from the conclusion of  Embodied Idolatry: A Critique of Christian Nationalism

Original Sin: Sebastian Moore

Original sin “is a distinctly Christian . . . one could argue . . . a distinctly Western Christian belief, based . . . largely on the writings and authority of Augustine.” A great deal of ink has been spilled over this doctrine, especially as to how it was originally formulated by Augustine, and later interpreted by theologians like Luther and Calvin, as well as hyper Augustinians in the mold of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French Jansenists. While I believe a number of formulations of this doctrine should be abandoned, I do not believe the doctrine as a whole should be tossed out. While Augustine may have misstepped in his understanding of certain aspects of original sin, I do believe his insight, that something is fundamentally distorted in human nature, holds merit.

There are two particular articulations of this doctrine I have found to be compelling, those of Sebastian Moore and Thomas Keating, both of whom were formed in the Benedictine spiritual tradition of lectio divina, meditatio, and contemplatio (sacred reading, meditation, and contemplation). Both men were also well read in theology and psychology. While both offer similar insights about original sin and the human condition, each has offered his own unique ways of approaching both the nature and consequences of original sin, as well as prescriptions for bringing about divine healing from its effects.

Humans have evolved as social creatures and are relational by nature. The relational quality of human nature means, for Moore, that we are drawn into personhood by the desire of an “other,” an “other” who, in recognizing our desirability, draws us toward the other, toward intimacy, with the hope of union. “Desirable, I desire another and hope to be desired by the other.” When experiencing the desire of the other, we experience a sense of arousal. This corresponds with the hedonic principle discussed in chapter two. The pleasure of desirability motivates our move toward relationship/intimacy, giving shape to both intrinsic and instrumental desires.

Underlying Moore’s analysis is his use of Freudian categories for the development of the individual, especially in the Oedipal stage. Unlike Freud, Moore does not limit the desire of the child for the mother to feelings of a sexual nature, which Moore felt was too constraining. Girard, in Violence and the Sacred, also saw this as problematic in Freud’s theory. In the early months of a child’s life, before there is an experience of a separate self, there is an unselfconscious experience of unity/oneness with creation. One of the great shocks in early life is the experience of separateness. Moore writes, 

[a]s that most alarming thing, ‘conscious separate existence’, really gets under way, the need for support becomes enormous. And not for a support of the crutches type that would mitigate the venturesomeness of individual reality, but for a total encouragement of it. The first powerful sense of self looks ecstatically to the mother for support in an incredible adventure.

Moore notes that the child’s complete reliance upon its mother as the means for a total sense of self is “a burden that no one can fully shoulder.” Because humans are finite, carrying their own individual sense of incompleteness, thus reliant upon an other/s for a fuller sense of self/being, the mother will not be able to act in a capacity that will offer a sense of fullness of being for her child. The attraction toward the mother is not exclusively, or even necessarily, sexual, though eros plays a role. The arousal in being desirable is erotic, a passionate desire not limited to crude sexual stimulation. Because the mother is the primary locus for the child’s hopes for desire satisfaction, that is, the mother’s recognition of the child’s desirability—thus initiating the pull toward psychological personhood—the introduction of the father, who also claims desirability from the mother, is perceived and experienced as a threat to the child.

As an opaque awareness of a loss of unity and oneness with all creation has occurred through an experience of a developing separate self, desiring the paradisiacal experience of the womb compels the child to seek a sense of unity/oneness by means of another’s desires. Experiencing disappointment in this quest, first with the intrusion of the father, Moore states that “[w]e might see in this moment, of ecstatic expectation directed to the mother and disappointed into the normal anxious existence of the human animal, the human moment, in which we can read all the tragedies and glories of humankind.”

Moore takes issue with the traditional articulations of the doctrine of original sin where once humanity sinned according to the Adam and Eve myth, God rejected them, dispelling them from paradise. This expulsion is interpreted as God no longer desiring the humans God has made; thus, they are constitutionally undesirable because of their sins. This congenital undesirability is transferred to each subsequent individual who inherits both the inclination to sin, as well as the punishment for the inheritance of this original sin. This punishment consists in the experience of undesirability and alienation from God. Analogically, we see in the experience of the child’s coming to a sense of a separate self a sense of expulsion from a paradise of unity/oneness, and now subject to work by the sweat of the brow to find this sense of wholeness of self. It is this early life experience—a sense of rejection by the mother whose attention is drawn to an “other”—that Moore sees as our experience of original sin. He writes,

[t]his first focus, in which self is all enmeshed with other, is influential over us without a rival. Why would anyone think of being him/herself other than the way they first came to consciousness? The world on which we first opened our eyes psychologically come to be the world. . . . The original habit (and yes, we can think of ‘original sin’ in this connection) of self-assessment-by-others undergoes a crucial complexification at the second-of-all-crisis, the Oedipal phase.

This experience of rejection and sense of undesirability, or limitation of desirability, infects later beliefs about divine attitudes toward us. The craving for desirability, both by other humans and God, informs one’s strategies and struggles to gain a deeper experience of desirability. Moore writes, “[t]he whole of history could be seen as the complex struggle between the original habit binding people into its limited ways, whence come conflicts of every kind, and the gentle pressure of the spirit in people seeking to break out and free them.” The original habit/sin consists in a misdirected search for fullness by means of finite objects. The mimetic nature of human consciousness compels us to imitate models we hope can bring us the fullness we crave.

Girard’s understanding of original sin correlates with Moore’s, in that Girard sees it as the negative use of mimesis. He states that, “[t]he original sin is the bad use of mimesis, and the mimetic mechanism is the actual consequence of this use at the collective level. . . . The mimetic mechanism produces a complex form of transcendence.” In archaic cultures this use of mimesis led to the development of rituals of sacrifice, placing blame for social instability, grounded in mimetic rivalry, on some innocent victim, the scapegoat. In order to obfuscate what is in reality a murder, the ancients divinized the victim in order to present the sacrifice as a sacred act, thus acquitting the murderers from charges of actual homicide. But with the revelation of Christ the myths legitimizing murder of innocent victims are revealed as lies, in turn revealing both the innocence of the victim, and the criminality of the culprits. Girard sees these archaic practices of sacrifice, using Durkheim’s terminology, as “social transcendence.” Girard defines this as

the idolatrous transcendence from the point of view of the Judeo-Christian perspective. It is an illusory and idolatrous form of the sacred that, nonetheless, can protect the archaic community from greater and more disruptive forms of violence. It is what Paul says also regarding powers and principalities, meaning the secular powers of this world.

Because Christ’s revelation exposes the scapegoat mechanism for what it is, humanity can no longer legitimately claim innocence for acts of murder, expulsion, marginalization, and dehumanization. Yet, Christians in every era have fallen back into acts of sacred violence, justifying these acts as biblical, and thus divine. This, in Girard’s words, is satanic. Satan, the great accuser is not actually a person, but an aspect of human practice that accuses those who are innocent for the ills and instability of social life. The valorization of nationalism, which is grounded in oppositions, distinction, and claims of difference that subject some to subaltern status, is essentially satanic. Ironically, all of this goes back to the simple reality that we have come to conscious self-awareness with a lost sense of our original desirability and that we therefore create victims.

It is our quest for fullness, an experience of total desirability, and the actual experienced lack of this desirability that distorts our recognition that only in the truly divine—as opposed to the violent sacred—is found this fullness. Thus, in our habitual search for fullness, we turn our wrath on those we believe impede our quest. From this arise thoughts and acts of vengeance. As I discuss below, in my examination of Thomas Keating’s work, what and who inform our sense of transcendence is learned early and uncritically and can lead to a great deal of conflict and struggle.

    Building on Moore’s psychological approach to the doctrine of original sin, Neil Ormerod breaks down the tradition of this doctrine in the following formulation:

 1.  Adam sinned (however we may understand this). From the beginning of human history sin has been part of our condition.

2.     Because of Adam’s sin, we all suffer (however this suffering may be conceived). Sin has its consequences, not just for the one who sins but for all those around.

Because of this, Ormerod concludes:

3. We are all the victims of Adam’s sin.

This is a shift in focus regarding culpability. Ormerod writes, in this schema

[t]he doctrine of original sin says that, prior to sinning, we are first and foremost sinned against. To be sinned against is to be a victim of another’s sin. To be sinned against, especially in early childhood, is to enter into a condition of human brokenness, an interior shattering or distortion of consciousness that muddies our search for direction in the movement of life. To be sinned against in this way, to be thus broken, is the prior state that inclines us all to personal sins of our own.

Being drawn into life and personhood through the desiring of an “other,” who in recognizing our desirability makes us feel desirable, we subsequently feel a sense of victimhood when we perceive that our need to feel desirable is denied. The most tragic experience for individuals, especially those exposed to misguided articulations of the doctrine of original sin, either explicitly or implicitly, is that one not only feels undesirable to other humans, but more profoundly, on an existential level, is taught to believe that God rejects one’s self due to sin, making one metaphysically undesirable. This is a terrible and tragic lie in Christian theological history. Having lost the original experience of unity and oneness, due to coming to a sense of a separate self, we strive somehow to recapture this initial unity and oneness, this initial experience of pleasure/feeling good. Moore summarizes this quest:

All our desiring is an attempt of an original feeling-good, an original hedonic sense of myself, to extend itself, to realize itself over the wider field of interaction with others. All desiring is the attempt to realize the dream of myself, of a self-in-bliss which was my original condition in the physical, then the psychic, womb. All desiring is the attempt to be happy, the attempt of an original happiness to extend into the particulars of life.

 

The God of Wrath, or the God of Love?

 

Rene Girard, in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, writes, “…the whole of human culture is based on the mythic process of conjuring away man's violence by endlessly projecting it upon new victims. All cultures and all religions are built on this foundation, which they then conceal, just as the tomb is built around the dead body that it conceals. Murder calls for the tomb and the tomb is but the prolongation and perpetuation of murder. The tomb-religion amounts to nothing more or less than the becoming invisible of the foundations, of religion and culture, of their only reason for existence.

Woe to you! for you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed. So you are witnesses and consent to the deeds of your fathers; for they killed them, and you build their tombs (Luke 11, 47-48).”

In much of Christian theology there has been a misrecognition concerning the nature of the divine. This has resulted in a projection on to the divine an all to human construct. In Girardian analysis of the origins of human culture, there is the hypothesis that the hominization of homo sapiens resulted from an increase in the level of mimesis in archaic human social relations. This in turn led to an increase in violent reactions against members within the same social group, a change from typical non-lethal violence against those within the group, as observed in other primate societies. Over millennia of experiences of victimage against an ingroup member, due to heightened mimesis, there occurred an increased conscious attention to the body of the victim. This in turn led to a development of an increase in conscious symbolization. Humans began to develop a consciousness of meaning. The carcass of the victim thus took on semiotic import, as recognition that death was something to fear, in turn increasing levels of anxiety over the possible destruction of both the individual and the group from which the individual found security. At this point, Girard notices three things regarding ingroup victimization. First, as the mimetic crisis reached levels of possible communal extinction, an all-against-all, the group turns its attention towards one of its members who is believed to be the source of social conflict. This individual may display some form of physical dissimilarity from the others. (It is important to note that the victim is innocent, in that the violence arose from heightened mimesis. Thus, the whole of the community is culpable). In a state of mimetic rage, the group violently, wrathfully, attacks the ‘demon’, killing him/her. Second, in the immediate aftermath of this communal murder, peace and catharsis descends upon the group, as though some numinous divine power had descended and restored the community back to order and harmony. Third, there is now a transfiguration. The ‘demon’ has been transformed into a ‘divine being’, whose numinosity transforms the mimetic contagion of violent chaos into peaceful order.

Inevitably social conflict, the result of the increase in conflictual mimesis, will again bring about a mimetic crisis. Over time, as conscious symbolization increases, human communities will have reflected on the power of sacrifice, that is, the ameliorating effects of the immolation of a surrogate victim. While this whole process is the foundation of culture and religion, it is also the foundation of a hermeneutic that sees the divine in need of sacrifice to bring about social order and harmony. As ancient religions began to develop rituals of sacrifice, reflections on the nature of the divine also grew. When one investigates ancient pagan views on the nature of their gods, there is a ubiquitous acceptance that these gods can be both beneficent and capricious.  Numerous myths show us how easily a jilted deity can turn on its devotees. Thus, the need for military endeavors to begin with sacrifices and rituals that attempt to discern the mood of the gods before going into battle. Disregard for the proper propitiations could be devastating. Persecutions against Christians, exampled by edicts propagated by Decius and Diocletian/Gelarius in the 3rd and 4th century, are grounded in this religious imagination.

It doesn’t take too much research to see that this religious construct was incorporated into Christian visions of God, despite Christ’s incessant revelations to the contrary. Built into this misrecognition of the violent sacred, sprung from human mimetic violence, with its attendant social and cultural structures, is the persistent vision of divine wrath. Christ came to expose this illusion. He came to reveal a God whose nature has no track with violence, vengeance, or retribution. These are the gods of human construction. And unfortunately, this misrecognition informs the violent hermeneutics of many Christians and Christian theologians. It is no wonder, in my opinion, why those ecclesial communions who persist in their commitment to this hermeneutic are no longer finding persons, who having become suspicious of any form of sacred violence, interested in their religious structures.

Midnight Mass Review

 The acting and storyline were excellent. The ending speech about the nature of death, well…

There is a very significant theological belief usually believed to be primarily an Eastern Orthodox tradition; theosis, or divinization. It is actually found in the western tradition as well, e.g., Aquinas. St. Athanasius famously stated that God became human so that humans could become God. At first blush this sounds blasphemous, arrogant. But it is actually a profound insight into the depths of God’s utter self-giving love, without reserve. There is no doubt everyone of us has delimited the infinite, apophatic reality of the divine whose essence transcends human speech and imagination. But this does not mean that there is no univocal relation that allows us to at least intuit the ability to know something about the divine, as limited as it is. One thing we can experience, I believe, is to intuit the personal nature of the divine, though this in itself exceeds human categories. The final speech was wonderfully, and dramatically (with proper music effects) delivered, eliciting emotions that could easily give the impression of veracity to the content of the words. But if one payed careful attention, the ultimate message was a romantic Nietzschean ode to one stream of an ancient Greek conviction, that being the belief in an eternal recurrence. This speech could have easily been inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra, or Ecce Homo. Why Hollywood has such animus against the possibility of the continuance of human consciousness as a gift from the eternal generosity of an eternal love is beyond me. Maybe there is underlying such a fear a terror that how we live our lives have consequences that cannot be so easily eradicated through the annihilation of our self-reflexive consciousness, a consciousness that may desperately want to deny the possible cosmic justice that takes account of human injustice. The inexplicable leap from a totally catholicised script to a materialist humanism was rather jarring. For me, someone who has written on anti-Catholicism in American history, this became a not to subtle screed in which Catholicism can only be an oppressive institution that engenders self-righteousness and spiritual rigidity. While popular portrayals in the news and social media take pedantic pleasure in pointing out the worst in Catholic culture (sex abuse, ecclesial cover-ups, conservative exclusionary attitudes), it neglects the profound beauty that many of us experience in this very human, yet also divine family. So, in the end, I very much liked the show, the acting, and most of the writing. But the ending was, in my humble opinion, disingenuous.

 

Culture - Beauty, Art, Music - And God said "It is good, it is very good"

 The human soul needs beauty, it needs imagination, it needs art - it needs Culture. God created, and it was beautiful, it was good! Having been created in the imago Dei, we too have been blessed with the gift of creation - creation of beauty. Too many have forgotten that we are called to be evangelists of beauty. 

Riccardo Muti reminds of this need for Culture, for beauty.