Reading in the Shadow of the Law

"In the middle of our life's path
I found myself in a dark forest
Where the straight way was lost."
Inferno

There was a time when the forests covering Europe provided a home for vagabonds and outlaws, outside the king's grasp.  Nevertheless these forests were considered property of the monarch, and so under the canopy and out of sight, outlaws lived in the shadow of the law. 

In every institution, especially religious ones, there are forms of normative discourse, proper ways to read and expound texts.  "Normative" could be replaced with "dominant" in the previous sentence because as we know the -normative is- by virtue of coercion and power.  This coercion and power may take many forms.  Think of this normativity as the clearings and cultivated land of the kingdom.  Here the king may bring his full power to bear on the inhabitants of these open spaces, open to his force and to his gaze.  In such places the reading of a text has a genealogy, a tradition.  Interpretation and explication is grounded in this tradition, and is known as "received" or "majority." 

The wilderness has long been a place of refuge.  It is the oldest form of sanctuary, the sylva sacrosancta, the inviolable wood.  It is both a place of shelter and of madness.  In it the most powerful forces of chaos lurk, the savage, the beast, the wildman.  Here too the gods and a host of spirits dwell unseen.  A chance encounter with these may lead to terrible things indeed.  While some may travel into the forest out of necessity, others may do so for adventure.  The forest has claimed these as well, turning some mad, killing others.  Some, like Tristan or Lancelot, endured their madness and returned to civilization triumphant over the forces of the forest. 

Here in the shadows of the trees, in the shadow of the law, we sit down to read and write.  We cannot dwell here long lest the gods drag us into the darkness, lest we be punished for our own presumption.  Yet we do not come here merely for adventure.  When we return to civilization we will remember, and we will not think we have overcome the ancient sylva sacrosancta like these others.  We will not forget that along the edge of every civilization the forest lies in wait, as outside the walls of Rome or the stockades of the New World, to reclaim what was once its own.  We will respect the law, but we will not allow it a purchase on our soul.  And yet we must resist the urge to abandon ourselves to the forest, for this is another kind of madness, one in which we are liable to be torn to shreds.  Can we dance with Dionysos without falling prey to his Bacchae?

From a Requiem

"When somewhere, from deep within me, there arises
the vivid sense of having been a child,
the purity and essence of that childhood
where I once lived: then I don't want to know it.
I want to form an angel from that sense
and hurl him upward, into the front row
of angels who scream out, reminding God."

Rilke

Great thoughts

Make for lonely nights

Behold a mystery

A hooded figure makes his way among the cenotaphs of a great city
And as I stand honouring the dead he passes near
I hear him whisper, a violent exhalation
And grasping my collar he collapses

"I give you my last words, draw near," he gasps for breath
"I am Azazel, now mortal," and spitting gnashed his teeth

Speech of a madman I think.  I will give this wretch his parting company

"You think I am mad.  But no more than you who stand before a corpse
You defile a flower to honour the worms and yet think me mad," choking with mirth says he

I bite my tongue, for he will soon join the worms by the look of him

"Very good.  You are not the fool you appear to be
Now listen fine fellow I give you a gift"

From his filthy pocket he passes me a tattered cloth, his hands shaking. 

"Take this and read.  It contains a great mystery revealed to me by our father"

"Man there is nothing written on it" I cry

Laughing and spitting, gnashing his teeth into the ground he breathed his last

And leaning back against a tombstone shiver
But upon glancing at my hand I leap to run
And fancy hear the madman at my back
Behind me drop the tattered cloth
Whose filth-stained threads now bear the words:

"the perversion of sin is the secret of salvation"

In Praise of Love

"When I lean on the shoulder of the woman I love, and can see, let's say, the peace of twilight over a mountain landscape, gold-green fields, the shadow of trees, black-nosed sheep motionless behind hedges and the sun about to disappear behind craggy peaks, and know - not from the expression on her face, but from within the world as it is - that the woman I love is seeing the same world, and that this convergence is part of the world and that love constitutes precisely, at that very moment, the paradox of an identical difference, then love exists, and promises to continue to exist.  The fact is she and I are now incorporated into this unique Subject, the Subject of love that views the panorama of the world through the prism of our difference, so this world can be conceived, be born, and not simply represent what fills my own individual gaze.  Love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world."

Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love.

Symbol

"All symbols assert that the good for man is to live realistically; where they differ is in the vision of reality they construct."

Geertz

Victor Turner

"Cognitively, nothing underlines regularity so well as absurdity or paradox.  Emotionally, nothing satisfies as much as extravagant or temporarily permitted illicit behaviour."

Felix culpa

Infinite Night

My feelings regarding the afterlife are well-known and may be found on this blog.  They are based not just on science, but common sense (and by that I mean a common method of reasoning, not popular sentiment).  That there is nothing beyond this life, no conscious existence outside of the present, is without doubt. 

It is interesting that others have accused those of us who hold this position of wishful thinking!  The reasoning goes like this: "When forced to choose between eternal damnation and complete annihilation the choice is an easy one.  You deny an afterlife out of fear, yes out of psychological necessity."  On the face of it and from a certain perspective this is a reasonable critique.  A similar one is made in the opposite direction, namely, that heaven is the product of a similar type of wishful thinking, a consolation in a world desperately in need of such a comforting thought.  The two arguments are not equal however.  In the former, a certain assumption is being made: it presupposes belief in a place of damnation or hell.  Out of fear of this place, a real possibility, one turns to annihilation.  This argument can only be framed from the perspective of faith.  As such it constructs a straw man, only to blow him down.  It is simply not the case that those who reject the notion of an afterlife are secretly harbouring religious beliefs.  Now regarding the latter critique the presumption of faith is warranted.  Those who believe in an afterlife, for the most part, hold religious beliefs.  While wishful thinking may shape the debate on both sides, one should not define that wishful thinking on the side of the afterlife deniers as a religious fear of hell.  This is simply a false attribution, a religious projection.

This latter view also makes the assumption that annihilation is a comforting thought to afterlife deniers.  This again is a reflection of the influence of a religious alternative creeping in, i.e. hell.  On the contrary, the thought of nothingness can be somewhat unsettling at times.  Even when one reflects that the same condition will exist after death as it did before conception and development of the nervous system, it is still quite a pill to swallow at times.  Before conception and nervous system development, one had no relations, no memories or loved ones.  At death, however, one has all these (unless the brain has already started to decline).  It seems like a great loss, and I suppose it is at one level.  But I suppose there is also something quite fitting about it.. a kind of sacred simplicity even.  Every symphony must end..  every string on every instrument cease its vibration.. We must all, as conductors of our own lives, lay down the baton a final time.

Malinowski contra Durkheim

"The lover near his sweetheart, the daring adventurer conquering his fears in the face of real danger, the hunter at grips with a wild animal, the craftsman achieving a masterpiece, whether he be savage or civilized, will under such conditions feel altered, uplifted, endowed with higher forces.  And there can be no doubt that from many of these solitary experiences where man feels the forebodings of death, the pangs of anxiety, the exaltation of bliss, there flows a great deal of religious inspiration.  Though most ceremonies are carried out in public, much of religious revelation takes place in solitude."

Letter to a Friend

It's miserable now, and the world no doubt seems like it's ending. In a way it is ending.. the world as you once knew it is no more. The sooner you accept that you can never go back to this world the better.. but of course you're probably in no position to accept it yet.

I lost my mind during my separation.. I mean I was lost completely. During that time I had to do whatever it took to keep from going off the deep end into suicide. It meant creating a space for myself right where I was. It meant rethinking what it meant to be me.. you know, who I was as a man apart from anyone else. Throughout history men (and women) have found themselves in that place.. and they have left some heart-wrenching monuments along the way. It is a human truth that each one will move through that moment in a different way. Some will indeed commit suicide.. others will become destructive towards others and themselves.. still others will channel their feelings into a momentous creative act.. some will travel. Each one is different.

The reality is life is an open possibility.. even though it may not feel like it right now. It is. The key is not to do something stupid that will narrow those possibilities.. In the moment this kind of foresight is rare.. but it is vital. Destructiveness is ultimately futile. Suicide works in that it ends the pain, but it's permanent, without the possibility of discovery or a new event. But all men, having considered suicide and persevered, realize what a small thing it was, in the end, that caused them to consider death, the most unchangeable human act. The act is not commensurate with the suffering... There is no human experience that is as permanent as death (including suffering), and so the suicidal act is ultimately excessive. What you need is not excessiveness, but simplicity. 

Here in the early hours of darkness is no time to lose your head.

Freud on Reason and Religion

"Our God, Logos, will fulfil whichever of these wishes nature outside us allows, but he will do it very gradually, only in the unforseeable future, and for a new generation of men. He promises no compensation for us, who suffer grievously from life. On the way to this distant goal your religious doctrines will have to be discarded, no matter whether the first attempts fail, or whether the first substitutes prove to be untenable. You know why: in the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable. Even purified religious ideas cannot escape this fate, so long as they try to preserve anything of the consolation of religion. No doubt if they confine themselves to a belief in a higher spiritual being, whose qualities are indefinable and whose purposes cannot be discerned, they will be proof against the challenge of science; but then they will also lose their hold on human interest."

Sermon on the Occasion of the Newtown Massacre

One cannot possibly stand before you today and neglect to say a word about the tragic events of recent days.  I would be remiss in my duties to take the pulpit without reference to an event that has drawn the whole world into itself, has caused so much suffering, so much soul-searching. 

At such times one’s pastoral duties must reflect the needs of the people.  To one, consolation.  To another, a listening ear.  To still another, an explanation (as if one can be offered, no matter how crucial an attempt may be).  For some the greatest consolation may come in the form of an explanation.  For others, a prayer or silence.  At the present time, from this stage, it is hardly possible to do all these things. 

One should not forget that a pastor too is caught up in history, in the same events we are all caught up in.  She is not above such events, but in her own way must come to terms with them.  In other words, this platform is not a privileged place where suffering and soul-searching are absent as if, as pastor, one has greater spiritual fortitude and tranquility.  On the contrary, the question of innocent suffering and the growing culture of death around us shakes the pastor to her core.  For this question is one that begs two others that necessarily follow: Where is God and where are God’s people?  The first wonders at God’s seeming absence while the innocent suffer and die: in the present time, young children, six and seven year olds.  This question is really quite an ancient one.  The second one, which is also ancient, wonders at the child of God’s place in the world.  That the Church of God is surrounded by a culture of death is certain.  That the Church of the Father of heavenly lights is already highly influenced and even saturated with this culture is equally certain.  The lesson of Luke 4, in which the Lord encountered a demon-possessed man in the synagogue, is not lost on us here.  Today we must be prepared to admit that among us too there lie powerful forces of evil.  One cannot be naïve in this regard.  There will always be weeds among the wheat, not just people of poor character among other people of relatively better character (!), but within our own hearts too we find weeds and wheat.

We will start with our first question: Where is God?  This is necessary because the answer to our second question regarding the people of God flows naturally from this.  First I think we can all agree that God was not there as the tragic events unfolded.  But we must be clear what we mean when we say “God was not there.”  We know that God, according to Paul and the poet he quotes in Acts 17 is that Being in whom we move and have our own being, and that for this reason he “is not far from any one of us.”  Presumably then he was not even far from the one responsible for the school tragedy.  That is, he is present-for-us at all times.  He is not, in some crude manner, a material substance that fills in the spaces between objects, but rather God is Spirit.  When we say “God was not there” we mean then two things: 1) The actions of the murderer do not reflect the will of any God we know, and 2) God was not there in the form of substance, however powerless, i.e. God did not physically restrain the murderer.  In these ways God was absent.  We must admit, as those who believe in a God, that God was nevertheless present in some way.  This way we call “Spirit.” 

One might ask, “what good is it if God is only present in Spirit, but cannot even lift a finger to help.”  One is entitled to ask this question, and indeed it should  be asked quite openly, even perhaps, especially in the Church of God.  For when we call on God for aid in troubling times, we should not imagine the most fantastic things, as if the greater our imaginings are, the greater our faith is.  We are not unaware of God’s chosen instruments of action, of the place where Spirit moves.  We are not ignorant of the meanings or implications of the Incarnation.  We have seen how consistent is God’s plan in that in our Saviour dwelt bodily the fullness of the Deity (Col.2:9), and now in his Church so too his Spirit dwells and moves.  The apostles were not in error to fall upon the ground and worship him, a man who hungered and grew thirsty, who defecated and shared all our bodily functions, though by all appearances their actions were shear madness.  So too the body of Christ today is made up of many undesirable parts and yet here Spirit moves.  God is Spirit.  This Spirit, who moves where Spirit wills, was surely moving in those present at the recent tragedy, those who made every effort to save the lives of the children in their care, those too who dashed to the scene to stop the murderer, even if it meant losing their own lives in the process.  This spirit of self-sacrifice and love is surely the Spirit whom we are speaking of.  So while we reject the crude notion of a God made up of particles of matter, and absent this type of God from the scene, we simultaneously acknowledge a much more tragic, yet for that very reason, triumphant Spirit present in the self-giving love and care of those present.  We cannot forget that if God can be pierced on a cross, he can be pierced in the heart of his people. 

This is the answer to our second question: “Where are God’s people?”  They are where the Spirit of God moves.  When they act and love they manifest the Spirit to and in the world.  Just as Eternity miraculously made its way into the body and form of a human being, so too Eternity now rises up out of this same body, each one of us -out of our finitude and smallness, it nevertheless rises!  You see God was not helpless to act in these tragic events, God did act.  Just as God once relied on a frail human body, so too God continues to rely on frail beings, beings afraid to act, to speak out, afraid to challenge the forces of nihilism and death that pervade our culture, afraid to meet the cross on our own, these creatures God lives amongst and shows himself to the world through.  Yet we have seen in the self-sacrifice of a few for the many that this is not a spirit of timidity, that in the end the will of the Father is our spiritual sustenance, a cup we are capable of drinking if we will take it in our hands as the few have done. 

The time has come to dispense with false notions of a God, with the individualism that runs so rampant we are not able to recognize in the Church the collective body of Christ, the Spirit of God.  One should not read the promise: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Mt. 28:20) without simultaneously reading “He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit” (1 Pet. 3:18): the Spirit that now dwells among us.  “You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you” (Rom. 8:9). 

What will be your basic orientation to the world around you dear child of the Spirit?  Will you confront the forces of death and decay with your comrades, shining a light into every dark corner, even those corners of your heart?  Will you participate in this culture of death and sit idly by, allowing the cup you've been offered to pass to others?  Or will you take this cup and drink it to the dregs with the conviction that today, as far as you and the great company of your comrades are concerned, Spirit will rise?

Regarding justifications

When will the justifications not be enough?

It is the case that the answer to the question of innocent suffering is simultaneously the fulfillment of our need for an explanation.

For this reason the justifications will always be enough.  The dissonance thinking animals experience as a result is reinterpreted as faith, real, suffering faith.

This does no honour to the slain whatsoever, but rather reinforces individual ego.   The religion of apology and silent yet suffering fidelity is the religion of Ego justification.

The only proper response is not to justify the very One who supports and reinforces ego, but rather to reject this One as a prosthesis. 

There is no ultimate meaning here.  The suffering of innocents is the necessary consequence of our animal nature.  Looking for answers anywhere other than this sublime (and yes, monstrous) animal is an affront to human being and existence. 

Eternal Returning

Rilke

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love

and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,

and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others

fall: again and again the two of us walk out together

under the ancient trees, lie down again and again

among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

The Odyssey

As one that for a weary space has lain
Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine
In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,
Where that Ææan isle forgets the main,
And only the low lutes of love complain,
And only shadows of wan lovers pine—
As such an one were glad to know the brine
Salt on his lips, and the large air again—
So gladly, from the songs of modern speech
Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free
Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers,
And through the music of the languid hours
They hear like Ocean on a western beach
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.

Andrew Lang, 1844-1912