{ 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.