{ the cost of delusion }

( A reflection on Luke 14:25-33 )

Jesus asks if we ever consider what it might cost us to undertake some task. The answer is of course we do. If anyone's going to build a house, buy a car, embark on a journey, pick a fight, set a goal, it's only common-sense, logical, to take into consideration what it's going to demand of us, to question whether we have the means to achieve our end. And we also have a fairly good grasp of what not doing this is. It is oversight, rashness, lack of foresight, blindness (it is not risky, for risk is knowing the odds and betting against them, or moving on despite them). Of course any sane, level-headed person would count the costs, especially if it costs something of oneself.

And surely the costs to oneself are the costs in question in Jesus' examples. The builder who could not finish the tower not only failed to adequately calculate the material cost of supplies and worker's pay, but failed to see what it would cost him if he failed - ridicule, surely, maybe a hard time getting employed again (for you build a tower for the city, not for yourself), so maybe it cost him his job too, his livelihood. Maybe even then his family, his friends.

And what of the king who goes to war with too few troops? He has not only underestimated his enemy, that is, given no thought to his enemy's resolve and resources, but he has failed to see the weight of the matter, failed to take war seriously, failed to grasp the consequences of defeat. All he can do is try to appease his enemy, and either accept his terms or accept defeat.

In the two examples, what is undertaken are means of defense (the tower) and dominion (waging war). Both have consequences beyond their immediate failure: if the tower is entrusted to a builder, and the builder fails, the city may fall and all is lost; if the army is too small, and the enemy is not so kind, the kingdom may fall and all is lost.

The costs that were unaccounted for were not rooted in mere physical oversight (the funds or militia needed), but rather, in a self-assurance that fails to account for the costs of defending one's self or overtaking another's. In both cases, it is imperative that the builder and the king recognize that nothing is more important, nothing more worthy of careful attention to their own resources, than the defense and triumph of one's self (whether that be through - or in the image of - the preservation of one's livelihood or kingdom, the difference is merely the scope).

And so Jesus, obviously, in calling us to a life of discipleship would tell us that faith is the most important wall, the grandest offensive. That if we are going to emerge victorious, we must make sure we leave no stone unturned in accounting for our self-worth. That once we have tallied our resources, taken stock of our kingdom, and found ourselves sufficient, only then do we even need bother to follow after him.

This should chagrin us in two ways: in what it assumes about ourselves and in what it takes as discipleship.

I feel as though the typical reading, the reading I have somewhat hyperbolized here, takes it that Jesus is telling us to make sure we enter into discipleship with everything we have, to take stock of ourselves and our resolve, and to give everything, our everything, to that endeavor. But do we really think we have that to give? Do we really think that our everything is enough? Or, if so, do we even know how to do that, to give all of one's self? Is that not the life, the maturation, of faith? Surely the leap of faith is not the complete abdication of the self, but the commitment to this particular path of abdication (the way of the cross). So if our everything is not enough, or if we have no way of accounting for the depths of our selves, our everything, how could we even begin to quantify that and would the sum we arrived at even budge the scale?

I feel that the reading I have been comfortable with for so long does not think these questions are at hand. But I'm led to think this is because, if these are (the) relevant questions, then Jesus' teaching about discipleship shakes the ground I stand upon. And Jesus shakes this ground, necessarily shakes it, because he has the courage and author-ity to truly acknowledge it. He recognizes that discipleship, if it is to be human discipleship, has to confront the truth about who we are, or rather, has to confront the lies we have told ourselves about who we are.

So I'm led to consider Jesus' examples as purposeful. He could have picked any goal, any task. Why these two? I would venture to say that it is because they are pictures of self-defense and dominion. They are pictures of self-assertion (the establishment and protection of oneself by oneself) rather than self-expression (the giving of oneself to others through commun-ication). I do not think these are pictures of discipleship, I think they are pictures of how we typically conduct our lives. I think these pictures point out both that the endeavors we usually undertake are of this self-asserting nature, and that such undertakings demand a lot of attention if we are not to end up the object of ridicule or defeat. I think Jesus is giving us certain images of self-assertion, of the illusion of self-sufficiency, of, ultimately, sin.

This is why I do not take his examples to be illustrations of discipleship. I do not know how to read his examples in a way to have them correlate with his comments on discipleship just before and after (to say nothing of the entirety of the Gospels). He says that we must count all we have, all that is closest to us, as nothing. We must value it as naught. If we are to so discount our own life and soul (psyché), how can we then go on to think that, after we look into ourselves, we may come up with anything that is worthy to contribute towards the building of a "tower of faith," or strong enough to fight a "spiritual battle"? We are to count all as naught; there is nothing to give, to contribute, that will make us worthy of the kind of discipleship Jesus calls us to?

And what is that kind of discipleship? It is one in which we are given a cross. Not by Jesus, but by the world. (What we are given by Jesus is the hope, joy, and love to be able to accept it.) It is a life that abdicates the role of self-protector and so opens itself up to ridicule. (Was this not the life of Christ?) It is a life that knows the only self and kingdom of any worth cannot be established through domination, and so can only ask for peace. (Was this not the life of Christ?)

We have to trade our images of power for images of oppression. We are not building towers and waging wars for the powers that be, we are accepting their crosses. For in a world where everyone (including ourselves) is engaged in the up-building of (our own) empires, there is nothing left for love but, because of its expression, to be kept out by those who are building towers and killed by those amassing armies.

Jesus asks us, "Who doesn't count costs? Who doesn't watch his back? Who doesn't go about making sure he avoids ridicule and defeat?" And he answers for us (because he is that answer, because we would have never found it on our own), "Those who would call themselves my disciples."

{ tradition and treason }

Tradition. It's hard to think of a less stale word. A word that can't even be bitten into, tasted, much less savored. It's hard to think of word that is more safe, secure - but like the room of a child who doesn't want to venture forth into the world, or of a prisoner who can't. The word looms like a storm cloud or a falling piano, and we often pity or fear for those who live beneath its shadow. We feel as if it stands at the gates of our minds, monotonously commanding our words, "Abandon all hope, ye who would enter the world." (And often our words turn back, for they, stifled at an early age, had no hope to part with....) The word is brown and sluggish, it is black with death, and whitewashed thereafter.

But how, with a refracted tongue, the word cries out to us from the grave of a dead language! Oh, tradition whose long-lost twin is treason! For we receive both children from the Latin womb, traditus: the X-chromosome, trans- "over" and the Y, dare- "to give." Tradition, that which is handed down, is also that which is handed over. And there is no safety in this "over." It is not the "over" of hierarchy, or of perspective, but the dangerous "over" at the root of treason, transgression, trespass, transcendence. It moves! And as such, it risks, it has to risk, is has to continually be given over. It ever and always risks cessation and atrophy. Even the state of transparency depends on being able, with ever second and every atom, to cede way to the light which passes through. To hold that light, to keep it for the briefest of seconds, is to forfeit its very identity.

And so tradition is a moving noun, it is not merely that which is given over but the state, the motion, of giving over. To stop that movement is to lose the very thing you thought you possessed. It is the stilling of a waterfall in a photograph. What a precarious possession! For in focusing on that possession, in that now beautifully framed print, we have but a memory of, a memorial to, the grandeur we had witnessed (unless our gaze was ever only through the viewfinder - and then never witnessed, a view found but wholly lost!). And that photograph - tradition held - can be nothing but a memorial, for not only is it not the thing itself, but is a witnesses to its death, or at least, to its paralysis at our hands. (Even the best of photographers can only create the semblance, or better, the illusion, of motion.)

And so tradition is never ours, or only ours as we are its, that is, as we both receive it at the hands of others and then turn and give it over into the hands of others. But tradition is not a precious painting (or photograph...) being passed down a line of gloved officials! It is a child we run with, it is an old man who leads us to the most spectacular views, it is a parent who brings us in from the cold, it is a lover who leads us to bed. And in all these, there is a giving of one self to another, a sharing of one self - who one is, what one has - with another. And so in tradition, this is what we receive and what we must give. For part of the beauty and vitality that tradition can be - if we let it - is that not only is it alive itself, and thus gives itself ever over to us, but it also connects us with those around us as they give themselves to us and we give ourselves to other.

Tradition is grabbed with bare dirty hands, bloodied hands, crippled hands...if we let it be (and if the tradition itself has room, a pulse, for this), and if we have faith that this is not to its detriment, but to its growth, its fulfillment, its glorification. And so we hope that in giving it over into these hands and others that they and we may be taken up, glorified with it.

So maybe this is what faithfulness to tradition looks like. Not the gloved procession of a relic. No, we misjudge tradition if we take the thing itself to be that which is precious. What is precious is the communion of lives that tradition enables, no, necessitates. What exactly that communion will look like, however, is frighteningly as much in the hands of the tradition as it is in those who find themselves within that tradition. And so the matter of whose hands we take (and in taking, offer - no, more, entrust! - our lives and selves and the very life and self of "our" tradition) is very much a matter of what we make of not just our tradition, but of ourselves as we hope those selves to be (a hope, of course, shaped by that tradition, shaped in turn, of course, by ourselves).

Tradition need not kill or stifle. In fact, if it does, we have lost not only the tradition, but ourselves. Tradition is a giving over, not a holding over (as a punishment is held over a child in threat), nor a taking over (as an occupying force disrupts and abolishes the prior life of a land), nor a leaving over (as if we didn't want it anymore). It is a giving over, it is gift. And we only give tradition as we give ourselves, and so, the frightening and humbling realization solidifies: Tradition is only as life-giving...or as poisonous...as we who give it are.

And here the Christian, at least, can only hope in the Spirit, for she (should, need to, must) know herself to be the most poisonous of all. And so she hopes in the story of the cross, in which the life of Christ is extinguished by the world (a world she calls her own, her self), and yet a life which is raised by something beyond the world in order to transform the world. And so the Christian prayer for (in) Christian tradition (the life of Christ) is that God may both transform the poisons we find ourselves to be as we keep, no, as we give over, that tradition - that life! - and that God may yet work in the world despite - even through! - the poisons we yet find ourselves to be (and find because of that tradition, that life). It is the prayer that we may be given the grace to betray ourselves, to be guilty of treason of the highest order: that our allegiance (our heart, our life) may be found to lie beyond the boundaries we have ourselves so well and so carefully mapped out.

{ fire }

I've been looking for a fire,
someone to inspire
this wooden heart to burn.
The city lights won't lend a spark,
no matter how bright they are.
And though they burn the streets are always cold.
But last Thursday I saw a glow
shining down on that December snow,
And like a moth I was drawn towards the flame.
Lights were dancing in her windows,
flames inside giving life to shadows,
and I felt my heart begin to burn.

I've been searching for a fire
in a world consumed in winter.
The chimney bellows her name
now my heart burns with the same.

Is God the spark? Is she the flame?
Am I the ashes that remain
once her fire's taken hold?
I'm so afraid I can't provide
the fuel she needs to burn inside.
Will I bring this blaze to a glow?
She stops me and she quiets me,
says, "darling don't you see,
it's only when we're both consumed that we are one."


...Happy Valentine's Day.

{ swing low }

Swing low, sweet chariot. 'Cause that's where I've found myself. Low. Not the low they knew, not the low the chariot had to swing down to in those days. Mine is not a spirit cracked by whips nor crusted over with blood that sometimes struggles to find reason enough to flow. But low to where I've slowly dug myself with the shovel of boredom, with the shovel of distraction, with the shovel of aimlessness. Low to where I lose sight of the horizon - with its promise that the heavens do indeed touch the earth. Swing low, sweet chariot. Come for to carry me home.

Come for to carry me home? But did I not have a home? No. Slavery was no home - that house which was a prison, built my by own hands or not. And this desert is no home. And the home of my forefather, before slavery and sand? My father was wandering Aramean, he had no home - he left his long ago for the promise that I'd have one my own. So, sweet chariot, carry me home, carry me to where I'll learn all that home was ever and always meant to mean.

But then, then! I looked over Jordan - that river, that ocean in the desert - and what did I see coming for to carry me home? What did I see coming forth from that promised land? What did I see, coming for to carry me home? A band of angles coming after me - coming after me, 'cause they had to chase me, 'cause I ran, 'cause men wandering in the desert are accustomed to sand and monotony, and don't take easily to heavenly beings.

No, they had to chase me. I ran. I turned back to the monotone in dead-fright of the harmonies that pursued me. I didn't expect home to be such a frightening place! Couldn't it have been just a more comfortable desert...without angels. I don't know what to do with angels. But they were coming after me, coming for to carry me home. Yes, the love of God runs on the wings of angels, it's a heedless, reckless love that sprints with no thought to distance. It will pursue you till it has to strip itself of the weight of glory just to have a chance at catching you. You ask, what did I see? I saw a band of angels coming after me, coming for to carry me home.

...and they'll drag me into the Jordan, down those muddy banks and drown me. Oh sweet chariot! And they'll drag me through the Jordan, 'neath the waters that are death and chaos and birth and life - the primal stuff that the breath of God moves into new creation. Oh sweet chariot! And they'll drag me out of the Jordan, up those muddy banks and set me on my feet. But feet that are now coated in the muddy clay of home. Oh sweet chariot!

Swing low, sweet, sweet chariot. Swing low and sweep me from this shallow timid grave. Swing low and sweep me through the muck and mire of Jordan's muddy banks. Swing low, sweet chariot, come for to carry me home.

{ avatar & district 9: worlds apart }

[ note: movie spoilers ahead ]

I recently gave into the hype and bought my excessively overpriced ticket (13€, not including the 1€ charge for glasses) for James Cameron’s latest blockbuster, Avatar. And yes, I am completely and unashamedly OK with admitting that the movie was a thrill-ride of the highest order and hands-down, one of the most visually stunning things I’ve ever seen on the silver screen. Probably the only things that lacked any real sense of depth in this 3D adventure were the plot and the characters. But I’m not a movie critic, so I’ll leave its merits as a “film” there. What does interest me though, being prompted by a few conversations, is the juxtaposition of Cameron’s Avatar with Peter Jackson’s District 9.

Though they seem to be two very different films, here are some overarching similarities:

1) Both films focus on an alien population whose future is being threatened by a more powerful human population.
2) Both human populations want the land upon which the aliens live.
3) Both alien populations refuse to leave.
4) Both of the main human protagonists are central/key figures in the attempt to remove the alien population.
5) Both protagonists become acquainted/involved with a particular individual alien.
6) Both protagonists come to sympathize with the alien population.
7) Both protagonists become aliens in the end.
8) Both films end in a victory for the aliens.

So in Avatar and District 9, the plots start in practically the same place, end in practically the same place, and use essentially the same steps between. And it is this basic, shared structure that makes looking at the differences that much more of a tenable, and interesting, endeavor.

One notable difference is the aliens themselves.

{ Neytiri, from Avatar }

{ a "prawn" from District 9 }

Notice that Cameron’s aliens are much more anthropomorphic. They are practically really tall humans with a tail and elfish ears; they have all the appropriate joints and bone structure, even five rightly proportioned toes! The Na’vi are beautiful, alluring creatures, they are even attractive. Cameron obviously does not want you to have any trouble identifying with his aliens.

Jackson does not make it so easy. His aliens are deliberately insect-like. Instead of skin, they have exoskeletons, their hip joints are insect-like, and one would certainly shrink away from their hands it they ventured a touch. The only human-esque feature are their eyes (which is no small thing, and yet such a small, small thing). The “prawn” (a derogatory name given the aliens in the film) are decidedly non-human and unappealing.

But it is not merely their physical appearance that is off-putting. The prawn inhabit a S. African slum and Jackson goes to great lengths to depict real slum life: there is violence, drugs, even prostitution. Nor is the prawn community in harmony with the surroundings; the documentary-style interviews with the local human inhabitants make that abundantly clear.

Now contrast the slum of District 9 with Avatar's Pandora, with its lush Edenic landscapes; and then too the prawn's impoverished and crime-ridden society with the Na'vi's peaceful and environmentally harmonious lifestyle - a thinly veiled idealization of Native American culture akin to what you'd find in Disney’s Pocahontas (though, to Disney’s credit, they actually did more justice to human nature there than Cameron does here).

So already, in choosing how to depict the aliens and their lifestyle, Cameron and Jackson have determined your initial response. But I think these decisions not only set the stage for the audience’s response to the films' aliens, but reveal the general tenor and depth of both films.

Cameron’s aliens are idealized and utopian. Yes, you have the jealous and suspicious warrior, but he is singled out as such. As a whole, the Na’vi are never depicted in a negative light. They are easy to love because they (and their planet home) represent that illusory return to Eden we long for in the midst of our busy and overly-complicated, technologically-dependent lives.

The humans - or at least the social spheres of corporations and the military - are portrayed fairly consistently as the opposite of this. And because Cameron has given us two characters who each represent one of these entities, it is all the easier for us to project our hatred and frustration with our own world (especially in regards to these spheres) onto them. He gives the evil "they" a face.

And so, in Avatar, the “good vs. evil” conflict is over-simplified and wholly externalized. The sides are easy to distinguish, easy to choose. And luckily for us, the audience, the “good” aliens look enough like us that we don’t mind standing beside them in their struggle.

District 9's picture is, again, a bit more difficult. Is it the repulsiveness of the aliens' appearance or that of their lifestyle that makes us cringe and want to look away? I would venture that the alien's off-putting appearance is meant as a challenge: these creatures will be hard to love, you will have to work at it. In a sense then, their physical appearance makes manifest to us that reaction we all too often have to the disparaged and dispossessed in our own world. Simply put, we do not want to be one with these aliens, nor do we do want to inhabit their world. At all.

And the humans in District 9? Well, they’re a lot more human, a lot more complex. Given, there is still the fairly one-dimensional military, but it is not as fully collapsed onto a single actor. And our main protagonist, Wikus, is a good man and a loving husband, but he is also a bit goofy and inarticulate, and definitely not the most attractive of the cast. He’s honestly forgettable, a face and a personality that would easily get lost in a crowd. And he’s also terribly flawed, as his trials throughout the film reveal his general disdain for the aliens and even a willingness to betray the very one that has been helping him.

So the “good vs. evil” conflict in District 9 is convoluted, complex, and located not so much between characters, but within them. You want the best for the Wikus, but more out of pity, and his fearful and self-serving conduct makes us shrink back from fully supporting him. And moving from a charitable pity to a true empathy with the aliens is a transition not fully guaranteed either.

It is within these over-simplified or realistically complex worlds that each director wishes to guide us, by way of their main protagonists, to discern what is truly human. What makes these films peculiar is that that discernment takes place as the main characters become more and more alien. But how that transformation takes place and is utilized in Avatar and District 9 makes all the difference.

In Cameron's version, Jake Sully (the main character) mentally inhabits his "avatar," which is an alien body he remotely controls from the safety of the human camp. As the film progresses, we begin to see Jake - and he begins to see himself - as more and more a part of the alien tribe due to his enculturation into the Na’vi (via his avatar) and the romantic relationship that develops between himself and his alien tutor. (Think Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves.) It is only in the last scene that Jake gives himself fully and permanently to inhabit his avatar and will thus, implicitly, go on living with the Na'vi on Pandora.

The transformation of Wikus in District 9 could hardly be more different. Here, our protagonist accidentally sprays himself with some alien fluid early on in the film. Throughout the rest of the movie, Wikus is slowly, and very unwillingly, transforming into an alien due to his exposure. This is met with horror, disgust, exploitation, and violence - by both himself and those around him. By the end of the film he is fully alien and living in the refugee camp himself, left only with the hope that the aliens whom he helped will return in 4 years with the promised antidote.

So how do these transformations work as far as revealing what it means to be human?

In Avatar, Jake's enculturation and final transformation is not at all dramatic, for it is what the audience did at the outset of the conflict: as soon as Cameron established the sides, we chose to identify with the aliens. And so we like Jake more and more as he gradually changes sides in the fight between humans and aliens (evil and good, respectively). The general message of Jake's transformation then, I think, might be that we often do not recognize and may actually be struggling against what is the most human (and "good") thing to do because it may appear so foreign to us.

But blunting the edge of this "scalpel" (which we need to cut away our own skin for self-examination) is that we, as the audience, recognized this truth right away. Neither Jake's acts specifically nor the film generally lead us into uncomfortable, new territory of what it might mean to be human; we were simply waiting for them to resolve where they did. So the moral edge to Avatar is only internalized as potential ammunition to use against others: we say to those who disagree with us as we said early on to Jake, "How can you not see the error of your ways!?"

But whereas we needed no encouragement or coercion to give ourselves to the aliens and their world in Avatar, District 9 has to drag us there kicking and screaming. In District 9, we (and Wikus) spend the whole movie hoping for a miracle that will reverse the transformation process. He does not want to be an alien. We do not want him to be an alien. Wikus' transformation is only a horrible disruption, a tragedy without poetic justification.

What Wikus' transformation does do, however, is force him (and thereby, the audience) into the world of the aliens. It is his search for a cure and the threat he faces from the humans (especially the military) that force him to take refuge in the camp and seek help from a particular alien. And it is through this interaction with the alien and the realization of the aliens' plight and, for lack of a better word, humanity, that Wilkus slowly begins to be an courageous and self-sacrificing person. And while this can be said of Avatar as well, the difference is that District 9 takes us somewhere difficult and asks us to love those who we find, if we are honest with ourselves, truly repulsive.

Moreover, it is Wilkus' own reluctance (which mirrors ours) to enter this world and act with compassion towards these creatures that make Jackson's depiction so much more honest. Sometimes it takes having our lives unpredictably entangled with those we'd choose to keep a "respectable" distance from to make us realize our shared humanity, and which actually calls us to a higher humanity. I would even venture that part of the challenge of District 9 is not to go about saving the world (like Jake Sully), but to acknowledge that our lives are already entangled, that the distance we put between ourselves and the slums is not so significant, and more illusory, than we think . . . or want.

I think that much of the difference I find between Avatar and District 9 boils down to the realities left in the midst of each work of science-fiction. Avatar simply asks me to take one step too far into unreality – it asks me to imagine a world (or universe, which is just “world” writ large) where there are no conflicted individuals and where good and evil are easily disentangled. In other words, where there is no such thing as the “human experience.” District 9, however, retains this reality, amplifies it, banks on it. In Jackson’s sci-fi world, humanity does not become subsumed into an imaginary "alien" perfection, but has to work damn hard to live up to its very name, and, as it turns out, it is the companionship with the unwanted "alien" that's most helpful - if not necessary - in doing so.