Calling Down Fire? A Reflection on Luke 9:51-56.

Today the gospel reading for Mass comes from Luke 9:51-56. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, where he will meet his tragic fate. As he and the disciples made their way south through Samaria, they were rebuffed and rejected by the Samaritans whose animus against the Jews informed their rejection of Jesus and his Jewish companions. In their anger towards the Samaritans, two disciples, James and John, inquired of Jesus whether they should call down fire upon the Samaritans. Jesus was incensed by this violent attitude and rebuked the two.

          In the early 17^th century, Miguel de Cervantes wrote a narrative about a hidalgo, a low level noble, Alonso Quijano. Alonso was a veracious consumer of chivalric novels, so much so that his fantasy life began to distort his mind, from which he ended up falling into madness. Alonso came to believe he was in fact a knight, a nobleman higher up the social ladder from his lowly hidalgo station. Of course, we know his fantasied alter ego as Don Quixote, that slayer of windmills and seeker of knightly adventures. Guiding the Don was the paragon of knightly virtue, Amadis de Gaul, the perfect model of knightly disposition. Amadis’s storied legend shaped the purposes, values, and attitudes of Quixote, so much so that even physical objects in the visual space around Quixote were transmogrified, taking on meaning through the lens of Amadis’s modelled perspective. A simple washbowl becomes a knight’s helmet. Amadis’s narrative influence on the mind and affections of Quixote, while entertaining, were also the cause of Alonso’s madness. Alonso had lost touch with reality, with how the world actually was. Rather, as he gave his mind and will over to his hero, his model, Alonso became a character – a caricature – of knightly manners and disposition. For all intents and purposes, Amadis de Gaul led Alonso Quijano on the path to madness because of Alonso’s desire to become one with a world he found more meaningful than the one he found in his mundane day-to-day existence. The world of chivalry and knightly adventures formed an ontic force and attraction greater than what the ‘real’ world could offer Alonso.

          In the gospel narrative, the shocking, for us, request of James and John, to call down fire from heaven, found its legitimacy in the Old Testament prophetic model, Elijah. Elijah had bravely faced opposition from the priests of Baal, who threated to draw Israelites away from the worship of Yahweh, a sin of which there is no greater in the Old Testament. In this epic battle of religious wills, Elijah, in his triumph over the priests of Baal, calls upon Yahweh to send down fire to consume the offerings offered by both religious sides. And low and behold, God answers Elijah’s request in the affirmative, and thus commenced a Baalic embarrassing BarBQ. Hurray for our side and our powerful, vengeful deity who smites our enemies. Adding insult to injury, Elijah has the priests of Baal slaughtered, in the name and honor of Yahweh, who is pleased with this massacre. We sing our hallelujahs as our Don Quixote of Israel successfully topples this idolatrous windmill.

          As Elijah is a biblical hero, it is only fitting that two first century Jews find in him their Amadis de Gaul, their paragon of righteous zealotry, their guide in confronting and dispensing with the enemy of God and tribe. However, Jesus seems to have missed this lesson in synagogue kindergarten class. In fact, he seems to down right revolt against this acclamation of heroic status brought about by Elijah’s violent act, an act lauded in its defense of exclusive Yahwistic worship. Could Jesus’s rebuke of such modelling inform us as to a paradigm shift in divine imaging?

          While it is a dangerous thing to make critical remarks about long held religious convictions, especially when it comes to scripture, I feel compelled to tread where angels fear to go. But let it be noted, Jesus seems to be giving me permission by his implicit teaching, found in a seemingly simple rebuke. Could it be possible that those who formed the many narratives and traditions of the Hebrew people, weaved into these narratives ideological constructs formed from cultural attitudes and dispositions towards ‘others’ that would be legitimized and justified through unconscious projections upon the divine, thus divinizing these varied and all too human constructs of violence and revenge? Could the various accounts of God’s violent responses to human behavior, especially behaviors transgressing deeply held and revered religious cultural frameworks, have been Feurbachian projections of human violence? I dare say, probably. Well, actually, uh, yes. And Jesus was not having any of it. In this simple rebuke, Jesus turned the religious imagination of his disciples on its head. A long held and revered model had been casually sidelined by Jesus in his refusal to entertain a very traditional response to a perceived enemy of God’s chosen.

          Our models, those we chose to inform and form our images of the world and the divine – how we both see and respond to our social encounters and experiences – shape our phenomenological hermeneutics, our interpretations of what is true, valuable, and meaningful. Even characters in the Bible play such a role for many Christians. And yet, in some cases, missing the all too human construction of God images found in various texts of scripture can actually lead us to misunderstand and misrepresent the God of Jesus Christ. And sometimes Jesus’s words will come to us in rebuke for our misunderstandings and dispositions. As the gospel of Matthew instructs us, ‘you have one instructor (model), the Messiah’ (Matthew 23:10). Even our interpretation of the Old Testament must be through the lens of our true divine model, Jesus Christ. Any other ultimate model will more than likely lead to madness, which in turn will lead to our condemning others, scapegoating others who we might wish to call down fire upon.

Not Seven times, but Seventy times. Forgiveness and the presence of God.

Matthew 18: 21-22

21 Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”

22 Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.

In preparation for celebrating the Mass for the third Tuesday of Lent, I did what I always do. I began the night before by reading the scriptures for the day, and then began reading various commentaries to spark some ideas as to what to preach. Since weekday Mass homilies are meant to be short, I usually try to find a core idea from the gospel to offer a short reflection.
            While I was pondering how I should approach the text, I recalled an experience that happened a number of years ago, and I decided to use that experience for my homily. Here is the gist of what I preached:
            A few years ago a friar from my province invited me to give a retreat to a group of secular Franciscans at his retreat center in North Carolina. Having never given a retreat before I had to figure out what I would offer them. I decided to go with what I taught in one of my theology courses. In this particular class I spend some time on the ideas of Rene Girard and St. Bonaventure. I specifically lecture on Bonaventure’s Souls Journey to God. I attempted to show them that in our Christian journey, we direct our course to God in a mimetic fashion. That is, because of our mimetic nature we form our ideas and attitudes about the journey through the modeling of others who we deem worthy of imitation. We Franciscans like to use the likes of Francis and Clare as models of spiritual wisdom.
            When I began talking about Bonaventure’s seventh day, when the journey into God is finding its destination in the full presence of the divine, I make note of something that I figured some would find strange. Let me explain. When I was in high school I would spend my free hour, in which I didn’t have a class, in the library. At the time I wasn’t much for reading anything heavy. I usually stuck with popular magazines, or else take a nap. But I did have a fascination with book covers (I’m weird like that). But around 1978 (I was a sophomore to best of my recollection) I saw a fairly new book on the shelf called Life After Life by Dr. Raymond Moody, MD. When I read the description of the book, that being near death experiences, I decided to give it a read. I couldn’t put it down. From that time until now I have been fascinated by near death stories. I have read dozens of books on the subject.
            In the retreat I noted my seeing a correlation between Bonaventure’s seventh day and near death experiences. I acknowledged that it probably sounded odd, and that it just might be my imagination. But no one challenged me. So I figured that they were either open to the idea, or else let the nutty friar prattle on about this mystical mumble jumble.
            At the end of the retreat, I celebrated Mass for the group. Afterwards we took photos, and then people began to depart. But one elderly gentleman stayed behind, and I could tell he wanted to talk privately. So we waited for everyone to leave the chapel, and he then proceeded to tell me his story. When he started with “when you talked about near death experiences” I figured he was going to challenge me. But in fact, he stated that he himself had had a near death experience not long ago. He stated that the experience had most of the qualities found in many other accounts: the universe was saturated by love, it was like swimming in liquid love, one could feel the overwhelming waves of forgiveness, etc. He even saw members of his family.
            But his story had a twist. He confessed that he had been harboring for years a grudge against someone who had deeply hurt him. He said he carried that inability to forgive into that experience. He was trying hard to put an ineffable experience into words, and said that he knew in the deepest core of his being that one cannot remain in that place of pure love and forgiveness holding on to unforgiveness. He looked intently at me and said, “Father, I am afraid that when I die for good I will still have that unforgiveness in me. I don’t know what to do.”
            To be honest, I didn’t know what to tell him. No words will magically free someone from something that they have cultivated over many years. Even though I could not fix him, I knew that I needed to take his experience very seriously. His story has stayed with me all these years, and it has haunted me. I know that I hold grudges. I don’t like this about myself. There are some people, especially those that I am close to – like some I have lived with in community – who I find to be emotional and spiritual thorns in my side. I know that in some cases I have cultivated unforgiveness towards those who have done real emotional damage in their actions towards and against me. And yet this man’s story keeps banging in my head and heart.
            In Matthew’s account, Peter wants to know how generous we must be in forgiving someone. He wanted to put a limit on it. But Jesus explodes all boundaries. I believe this is because we have been created in the divine image, from a God of eternal relationality. While the triune God is in the divine nature fully self-giving and fully other receiving without competition or caught up in selfish self-regard, we humans are broken in our inability to fully image that divine relational reality. We need grace to more fully participate and imitate the divine nature. Ultimately the wrath that is felt by the one who cannot forgive – even the trifles – creates the experience of being bound and imprisoned by chains of unforgiveness holding fast our souls. Such bondage is a deviation from our true nature, our true selves, selves called to the freedom of the children of God. We will be imprisoned until we can pay the debt of holding our grudges, our unforgiving hurts, and will only be released when we finally allow ourselves to let them go, and then bathe in the inexpressible joy of God’s loving forgiveness, a forgiveness that is eternally ready and willing to be given in full.

 

Attachment Theory, God Images, and Religious Exclusion

 

John Bowlby (1907-1990) pioneered what is known in psychology as Attachment Theory. His theory and research are found in a trilogy of books, the first of which was published in 1969. One of the interesting things about his theory is that it is still highly influential in the discipline of psychology. Numerous theoreticians have subsequently built on Bowlby’s work, and some have fruitfully applied Attachment Theory to the field of religious psychology.

            As humans have evolved as social creatures, there is a natural tendency for attachments to form, beginning in infancy. Unlike animals whose attachment occurs through the instinct of imprinting, humans form attachments over time towards those who they see and experience on a regular basis. Typically, this is the mother. But studies have shown that any other caregiver will do as long as there is a constant and consistent presence.

            Attachment theorists, building off the work of Mary Ainsworth, have categorized three general patterns of attachment in young children, A B and C. B types are those labeled secure. These are children who experience a moderate sense of distress when there is a separation from the mother. Because there has been a generally positive experience between the mother/caregiver and the child, the child is not overly distressed, having instilled a confidence in the return of the mother/caregiver.

Type A children are categorized as avoidant. The child manifests a type of indifference to the absence of the mother/caregiver, as most likely due to such previous and consistent behavior on the part of the mother/caregiver. However, in clinical studies, children are monitored for physical reactions, manifesting increased heart rates, indicating an internal distress over the mothers/caregivers absence.

Type C children are categorized as resistant, often also referred as anxious, ambivalent, or anxious/ambivalent. These types of children find separation from the mother/caregiver as highly stressful, and when the mother/caregiver returns manifests anger.

Bowlby maintained that children internalized these early attachment relationships, and these in turn became what he called Internal Working Models (IWM). This consists in how the child interprets and responds to the mother/caregiver’s behavior. This in turn will form cognitive and emotional structures shaping the sense of security in the individual’s relational experiences. This in turn will inform strategies of behavior and reaction to others. Lee Kirkpatrick writes in Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion, “Bowlby argued that in early life, IWMs concerning the degree to which caregivers are reliable providers of love, care, and protection are linked inextricably to mental models of the self as worthy of love, care, and protection. As a consequence of cognitive development, along with more varied experience with individuals other than the primary attachment figure, the models of self and others can become decoupled.”

            Kirkpatrick makes a convincing argument, in my opinion, that one’s God, or god, acts as a type of attachment figure. He writes,

 

For many people in many religions, I suggest that this attachment system is fundamentally involved in their thinking, beliefs, and reasoning about God and their relationship to God. This strong position suggests that, beyond apparent (and potentially only superficial) similarities, our knowledge of how attachment processes work in other relationships should prove useful in understanding the ways in which people construe God and interact with God. How does one tell if God “really” functions psychologically as an attachment figure? A good place to start is by identifying the principal criteria for defining an attachment figure—specifically, criteria that distinguish attachments from other functionally distinct kinds of interpersonal relationships—and examine how well beliefs about God meet these criteria. Ainsworth (1985) summarized five defining characteristics that are widely acknowledged to distinguish attachment relationships from other types of close relationships: (1) the attached person seeks proximity to the caregiver, particularly when frightened or alarmed; (2) the caregiver provides care and protection (the haven of safety function) as well as (3) a sense of security (the secure base function); (4) the threat of separation causes anxiety in the attached person; and (5) loss of the attachment figure would cause grief in the attached person.

 

Kirkpatrick notes that Bowlby

 

identified three classes of stimuli hypothesized to activate the attachment system: (1) frightening or alarming environmental events, that is, stimuli that evoke fear and distress; (2) illness, injury, or fatigue; and (3) separation or threat of separation from attachment figures. If God functions psychologically as an attachment figure, then we should find that people turn to God, and evince attachment-like behaviors toward God, under these conditions. Moreover, the experience of God as a haven of safety in these circumstances should give rise to the same kinds of feelings of comfort and security provided by secure human attachments. In fact, considerable research suggests that these are indeed the very conditions under which people, at least in Western Christian traditions, are most likely to seek God's support and comfort. In their textbook treatment of the topic, Hood et al. (1996) conclude that people are most likely to “turn to their gods in times of trouble and crisis,” and list three general classes of potential triggers: “illness, disability, and other negative life events that cause both mental and physical distress; the anticipated or actual death of friends and relatives; and dealing with an adverse life situation” (pp. 386–387)—in short, the same list provided by Bowlby.

The experience of comfort from God in times of distress can be a lifesaver for many people. Attachment to a God/god of comfort, however else one’s image of God is filled out, can become something worthy of protection. Any challenge to one’s God image then can be an occasion of emotional distress, a fear of losing an important form of attachment that has been life sustaining.

            Attachment theory has some resonance with the mimetic theory of Rene Girard, in that the influence of a model, in this case the mother/caregiver, has an effect on the formation of the child’s worldview. Where mimetic theory goes further is in the model’s influence in the formation of more than just a sense of security, but the formation of desires, values, principles, cultural taboos, and social rules shaping attitudes and behavior.

The formation of God images is complex. It involves a myriad of influences on the individual’s consciousness. Of great influence is the impact that models have in the formation of God images. Such models are found in individual’s relational social space, i.e., parents, siblings, friends, famous people in history or contemporary, and so forth. Models can also be found in more abstract realities, such as institutions, i.e., government and church. It is important to recall Ainsworth's five defining characteristics of attachment: (1) the attached person seeks proximity to the caregiver, particularly when frightened or alarmed; (2) the caregiver provides care and protection (the haven of safety function) as well as (3) a sense of security (the secure base function); (4) the threat of separation causes anxiety in the attached person; and (5) loss of the attachment figure would cause grief in the attached person. God images are always formed with human conceptual constructs. We cannot escape this reality. This means that how we articulate our understanding of the divine is necessarily with the categories presented to us through social and cultural artifacts.

Thus, as we form a deeper and deeper attachment to our God images, we form a more binding attachment to the social and cultural influences that have shaped these images. We tend to become protective of these constructs, believing them to proceed from a divine, thus infallible, source. To question one’s image is to question the deity itself. As noted in characteristic (5) above, loss of an attachment figure can cause grief. This is why there is such a fear of death of a loved one, because it is an experience of absence. A void in the heart occurs and it reminds us of the fragility of life and relationships. We become creative in both our denial of death and in filling the void. However, when it comes to God images (even though destructive in some cases), we tend to fight against any threat to that which has given us a sense of security and comfort. Such an image is replete with the many value systems that attend to a particular God image, formed in the mimetic relationships of significant models, be they an individual, a group, or an institution. In terms of the institution, the principles, rules, taboos, conventions, morals, etc., that attend to one’s adherence to the institution, are protected as being ontologically intrinsic to the very nature of the divine.

Dylan Thomas railed against the dying of the light. Attachments to our God images is like attachments to our loved one’s – we can’t bare to see them end. We crave the security and comfort they give us. We will protect, fight, kill to keep at bay the dying of the light. But the fact is, all God images are metaphors, incomplete, and do not manifest the fulness of the divine. I John 4:16 tells us that God is love. Jesus told us to love one another. How do these statements form our God images? For some, God’s love must be protected against impurity, the ‘other’ who does not profess/confess accurately the true image of the divine that we have, in truth, constructed. The fact that any deity needs protection says a great deal both about the weakness of such a deity, and the implicit need to play God. Attachments to such a small deity will inevitably manifest in fear and anger.

So, my question to you. What is your God image? How does it lead to greater love, humility, empathy, or judgmentalism, condemnation, and bigotry?