Letters from a Pretty How Town

{ the cost of delusion }

2010-03-31T22:29:00.010+02:00

( 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 }

2010-03-09T16:34:00.008+01:00

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 }

2010-02-13T23:01:00.005+01:00

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 }

2010-02-08T21:56:00.006+01:00

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 }

2010-01-19T00:41:00.012+01:00

[ 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.

{ healing and forgiveness, a postscript }

2009-12-17T19:07:00.005+01:00

When I wrote the last post, I have to admit I rushed the end. I was so excited and relieved to have finally made some sense of Jesus’ enigmatic question, and so committed to keeping the series to only four posts, that the conclusion ended up, in my opinion, fairly trite. Okay, so the Church is about healing and forgiveness, but we knew this already. And that all this is gift, well, as it stands I fear that doesn’t read much better than a bumper sticker. So if I could have one more go at drawing some conclusions from this passage in Matthew, maybe these lengthy reflections could better be shown worthwhile.

My first complaint with my conclusion in the previous post is that, after all the reflection on the paralytic and the scribes, I rushed to put “us” - the readers - in the place of Jesus. And while I do not think that to be a wholly unwarranted move, I think it might be more helpful and honest to approach Jesus and our participation in Jesus, trough the other characters in the story. For if central to Jesus’ self and life was the attempt to form a community based on the Father’s love, then it would appear that we cannot understand Jesus in isolation, that we have to understand him in his being with others (for isn’t this even what it means to truly understand ourselves?).

This passage in Matthew presents two different ways of approaching Jesus: the way of the paralytic and the way of the scribes. I tried to show what I felt to be at the heart of each of these characters in the previous posts. The paralytic’s approach was characterized by the acknowledgment of brokenness and human vulnerability that is able to hear Jesus’ words and thus to truly be in his presence. The scribes’ “approach” however, wasn’t even an approach, but a skepticism that kept its distance. They displaced their own guilt (however unknowingly) and failed to recognize true author-ity in the midst of asserting their own (illusory) authority.

In view of these characterizations, I think that these parties, in one sense, represent a single, albeit divided, human being (I am not sure there is any other kind). In the confrontation with Jesus, we are asked to bring our self as we truly are - the paralytic. This is the self the Potter can work with. But to allow his hands to work, to shape his story in us, is to acknowledge that all authority on heaven and earth is His. But this is what is so hard. This is when we find ourselves with the scribes, when we do not understand that for Jesus to write our stories is for those stories to be more truly ours.

In this passage, if we read the two groups as a single individual, we have here the struggle of faith: between the self we truly are and are called to acknowledge, which somewhere we know has to be brought to Jesus, but which would require being seen as weak; and the self that we have authored ourselves, that can stand just fine in making judgments of right and wrong, being as learned and devoted as we are. There is the self that we must ask others to carry for us, because we know we are to weak to walk alone, and there is the self that stays among its kind because illusions (especially of strength) are easier held in numbers.

And the differences continue. The point I think needs making though, is that the Christian life is a move from one to the other, from scribe to paralytic. The Christian life takes us from the deep self-delusions, not of modernity or capitalism or communism, but of sin, and asks us to see ourselves as in need, as vulnerable, that is, as we truly are.

That Christian life is partly a “movement” from this one self-understanding to the other, requires a way, and that Way is Jesus. If we are to find ourselves freed of our illusions and vulnerable enough to hear the reality of forgiveness in Jesus, then we have to walk after him on the way to the place where true humanity inevitably ends up in our world, in brokenness, on the cross. That is the way that Jesus is, and as we grow in Christ along his way, we shall be graced by the acknowledgment of our vulnerability, of our fragile, needy humanity, and see ourselves more like the paralytic. That, anyways, is what Matthew calls “faith.”

But we cannot start walking unless we recognize that we are, at the moment, scribes, and that the world we have made ever calls us to take our throne. Jesus’ words of retribution, of calling our righteous judgments “sin,” have to be accepted as truthful if we are to acknowledge that we actually need forgiveness.

But do we stop with the paralytic as our model for humanity? That is to ask, was my move of identifying “us,” the Church, with Jesus a legitimate move? Let me try to answer that question by way of, and in the midst of, another.

Thinking back through the story, and about the comments my friend had written about the similar event in Mark, I thought it interesting who was given voice in the story. As my friend pointed out, the paralytic never says a word. Put this in contrast then with the scribes who do have a voice, and use it to make the accusation of blasphemy.

But why does the paralytic not speak? Why does he not refute the scribes? To experience the forgiveness of God and not rebuke those who would condemn that act as evil? Would not then have been the most justified time to speak?

But he doesn’t. By one reading, he is content with Jesus speaking for him. Maybe to refute the scribes himself would be giving into the desire to be the author of his own words? For if Jesus is speaking on his behalf, what need he say? What could he say? Maybe then, in the forgiven man’s silence, we can read trust.

Saying all this, what then do we make of a Church that claims to be the body of Christ? And this is made complicated, or better, made more mysterious, by the consideration that the Church is Jesus’ resurrected body. Before his crucifixion and death, we knew how to make sense of Jesus’ body - it was a body just like ours, in all its physicality and materiality. But in the body of the resurrected Jesus we find a deeper mystery, for here we have a body that appears and disappears, a body that is in the Eucharist, a body that is no longer bound by the same restrictions normal bodies are. In the resurrected Jesus, we have a body - a true body, not a metaphorical one - that is, in a deep reality, made up of and shared among several bodies.

This is why it is not so easy to say what “Church” is, for ecclesiology is wrapped up in christology. The mystery of the Church is the mystery of Christ. This does not mean we have to walk away from either, rather, pointing to them as “mystery” is the promise of deeper meanings to be found. So the truth of Church resides in the truth of God. Any theory that is content with stopping short of this will give us a false picture of Church and possibly an idolatrous image of God.

I say all this because I feel a tension in the text between the verbosity of Jesus and the silence of the paralytic in regard to identifying ourselves with one or the other.

For if we are the Church, then we can truly identify with Jesus, for this is what Jesus has promised and what Scripture attests to. And moreover, being Church, we affirm that Jesus’ humanity is the fullness of humanity. So it would seem that we are to identify with Jesus not just as his resurrected body, the Church, but also as living into the fullness of humanity that he is.

So if all this is the case, then it would seem we are to speak. Jesus spoke and still speaks through his body - for this is how all communication takes place; letters, phones, etc. are extensions of bodies. Thus, it would seem that for Jesus to speak today would be for his body, the Church, to speak, keeping in mind the caution that the Church is a mystery that we would be wary of limiting.

But, on the other hand, I feel that we are truly to be like the paralytic, for Jesus says this man has faith, and this is the very thing he asks of us. And Jesus, seeing their faith, forgives him, and this is the very things we need. Thus it would seem that we, like the paralytic, should remain silent, that to offer our own voice and rebuttal would be to revert back to asserting our own author-ity.

So do we speak as Jesus or do we wait in silence as Jesus speaks? Do we really think that if we don’t speak, Jesus will no longer speak in our world? That Jesus “needs” us to speak? But on the other hand, is there not something about the love of God that we participate in through the sharing of the Spirit of Jesus Christ that calls us to speak, to shatter the illusions of sin in the world and confront others with the promise that is forgiveness?

I do not know if we need to choose between these two. For I think there are indeed times when we need to remain silent and allow the Church to speak for and to us, but this is not out of resignation or quieted dissent, but out of a need for forgiveness and feelings of gratitude. I think too that the times wherein we will need to remain silent are also the times when our idea of Church will grow, when we will find the forgiveness of God in places we did not expect it. And I think if we can recognize the mysterious nature of the Church, that it is bound only in the ways that the resurrected body of Jesus is, then we will be better able to be open to that holy forgiveness and presence wherever it may arise.

But if we disregard the model of the paralytic, then I fear the voice we claim and affirm as Church may turn to the voice of the scribes, where we come to denounce these new locations of forgiveness as a threat to the religion we have kept so well guarded. And then Jesus’ words of forgiveness can be but words of rebuke, and we must pray we still have the ears to rightly hear that, less we crucify those who sought but to forgive us.

But there is a time to speak, there is a time to affirm our voice as Church. But note how this voice is spoken in the story. It is one that reveals illusions and offers forgiveness. And this is a voice that we are daily growing in to, learning to speak. We often have a hard time remember the right phrases and our tongues stumble over the more difficult words (I hope it is clear that I say this all by way of analogy, that language is a form of life, that true Christianity is not about simply affirming doctrinal phrases). So as we speak, we need to do so with the humility of those who are still learning the grammar of Christ, looking to and learning from those among us, past and present, who are more fluent that we are.

I will stop here and refrain from attempting to tie all the loose ends together for fear of reducing them to pithy quips. And there is still much more to be gleaned from these verses, and thank God. For it is in hope and thankfulness, not in dismay, that we affirm Scripture is a mystery. Perhaps something else from this verse will strike me later. I can only hope. But for now, I think this is a good place to stop.

{ healing and forgiveness, part IV }

2009-12-15T01:15:00.003+01:00

But Jesus perceiving their thoughts, said, “Why do you think evil in your hearts?” For which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”--he then said to the paralytic--”Stand up, take your bed and go to your home.” And he stood up and went to his home. When the people saw it, they were filled with awe, and they glorified God, who had given such authority to human beings.

****

The second part of understanding the scribe’s accusation of blasphemy was to consider how their reaction explains and/or moves this act to its completion. I have to admit that this is a particular hermeneutic, that I am reading their presence in the gospel story as having a particular function.

A different approach would be to see their presence as more passive, wherein Jesus acts and speaks as he does in order to provoke or challenge the scribes (or Pharisees) in order to provide a teachable moment. But as was my caution against reading the scribes as mere foils, so too do I think such an approach would lessen Jesus’ humanity. His would be a life of actions not done for their own sake or because it was the most human (and therefore, obedient and blessed) thing to do, but of actions performed as mere examples. It would make it such that we could separate Jesus’ teachings from his person, like actors in safety commercials.

I think such a hermeneutic would practically empty Jesus’ life of significance, because such is not what we mean by “living” life at all. And to follow this hermeneutic to it’s logic end, we see that the cross then becomes not the manifestation of love, or the act of utmost obedience to God, or the inevitable end true humanity meets in a world structured by sin; instead, the cross is but the last (even if greatest) “teachable moment.”

So it is my attempt to preserve the humanity of the One who is humanity in its fullest that I interpret the presence of, and conflict presented by, the scribes as the foils with which the gospel writers make evident that humanity in its fullness. And, following my conclusion from the last post, it is my view that the scribes bring Jesus’ humanity into relief not merely as foils, but also through the illuminating juxtaposition of their own (broken) humanity with that of Jesus. The humanity of both sides of the equation must be preserved, that the scribes or Pharisees are “foils” is just another way of saying that conflict moves a plot forward.

Turning now to Jesus’ response, I hope my last post has made it clear why Jesus begins his response with “Why do you think evil in your hearts?” Let me first, though, address Jesus’ seeming telepathy. It is not my view that Jesus had the ability to read minds. I think such a reading of the text is based on two misconceptions: 1) that the ideal form of communication leaves words behind and 2) that Jesus’ knowledge as God was “super-human” knowledge.

We have a funny notion that if we could only read someone’s mind, then we could know what they were really thinking, that we wouldn’t be deceived or confused by their words. And while we can indeed hide our true thoughts from others, it is not our words that cut us off from each other, but what we do with our words. Our world and our minds are formed as we learn language, and they grow together. We learn our world and our language together: what a bike is, what a mistake is, what church is. The myth of telepathy is but another manifestation of the desire for a universal language, which is itself the manifestation of feeling chafed by our own skin.

Second, since Jesus was both fully human and fully God, we can attribute the predicates of both to him without contradiction. So we can say Jesus was tall or short, and we can also say he was divine. And we can also say he has human knowledge and divine knowledge. What we need not do here, however, is think that these compete with each other or that one overrides the other. To think that Jesus’ knowledge as God was “super-human” knowledge is to think of God as merely humanity writ large. Attributing “knowledge” to God is something we have to understand as metaphorical (or analogical), in the same sense that God has anger or that he repents. Whatever it means for God to “know,” it does not mean that he simply knows everything whereas humans only know a little.

So how did Jesus “perceive their thoughts”? Maybe in the same way we perceive each others': we see the eyes that are holding back tears, we see the hands that are shaking in nervousness, we see the shoulders that drop in disbelief. Jesus perceived their thoughts. Do we need science fiction or the supernatural to understand this? Maybe it is simply that Jesus is so fully human, so intimate with the human condition (whereas we live in denial or confusion about it), that the scribes’ actions spoke only too clearly. Jesus “reads their minds/hearts” in reading what is there for everyone to see: their expressions, their body language, their secrecy. And how blind must we be to be so surprised that Jesus called the thoughts “evil” of those not rejoicing at forgiveness?

Jesus saw the scribes huddling together, whispering to each other, he saw the angry expressions that surely coincide with condemnations of blasphemy, he saw the faces of the self-appointed victims, he saw the displacement of guilt. And from all of this he understood that there was “evil” in their hearts. (And we should not take it lightly or as common place that Jesus calls their thoughts “evil.” For it evidences that he knows their charge of blasphemy was not a righteously motivated one, that at its root was not holiness but self-preservation.)

Jesus then puts a question to the scribes: “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’?” I would imagine the scribes are left fairly befuddled by this question, likely thinking to themselves, “Who said anything about healing? And what does it matter which is easier?” Jesus’ response seems to leave the charge of blasphemy behind as irrelevant.

But maybe if we go back to the “evil” the scribes thought in their hearts we can better understand how Jesus’ response makes sense. For perhaps it is the case that for Jesus to respond to the charge of blasphemy would be for Jesus to not go deep enough; it would be simply addressing the surface accusation that, as I tried to show last time, was more of a symptom of the problem than the problem itself.

As I tried to show in the last post, the scribes’ charge can be read as the displacement of guilt and the attempt to preserve their position as author-ities. So Jesus asks them which statement is it “easier to say” or, put differently, “easier to claim authorship of”: “Your sins are forgiven” or “Stand up and walk”?

This question has the been at the heart of my confusion about the text, because, before rephrasing it this way, I had no idea how to answer it. For which is really easier to say? Well, to belittle the question, the forgiveness option has 6 syllables whereas the healing option has 4. More seriously, some would say it’s easier to proclaim forgiveness because by proclaim healing, it actually has to happen, so you’re putting more on the line. But would that then mean that Jesus takes the easy way out until he happens to see the scribes mumbling over in the corner? Or is it easier to proclaim healing? But that seems counter-intuitive too. It seems that either way you answer this question, you are still left with a problem. From this approach, the question only raises more problems rather than answering the one at hand.

But might it be the case that to even try to answer the question at all would be to miss the point, to miss the rhetorical intent? Might not the question be intended to respond to the scribes in a way that will silence them, that will lead them out of their “evil” ways of thinking into a promise of something, someone, greater?

It is Jesus’ rhetorical device here that is the clue to its interpretation. In Matthew 19:24, Jesus tells his disciples, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Jesus’ use of “easier” here does not presuppose that either one is possible, but instead highlights the fact that neither are. That it is “easier” for a camel to go through the eye of the needle, itself an impossibility, only serves to highlight that it is all that much more impossible for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. The rhetorical device of comparing two things with “easier” is intended to emphasize the impossibility of both.

So if we return to Jesus’ question in Matthew 9:5, we see now that we are meant to hear the question as a rhetorical one: “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’?” should be heard as, “It is just as impossible for you to be the author of forgiveness as it is for you to be the author of physical healing.” The point is that the scribes cannot say, they cannot author, either of these statements. They do not have that author-ity. Jesus’ statement returns their accusation of blasphemy with a question that both confronts them with their own human limitations, as well as the fact that they have overstepped those limits. Jesus' response returns the accusation.

And this is why his next statement is not a non-sequiter, but the logical conclusion. While Jesus’ question pointed to the limitations of humanity; his following words now point to the promise of God: “But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”--he then said to the paralytic--”Stand up, take your bed and go to your home.”

The text could not be more beautiful. Jesus does not merely claim that, unlike the scribes, he possess true author-ity, he makes it manifest in his actions and in the body of the paralytic. While Jesus’ rhetorical question underscored the impossibility of both forgiveness and healing, his actions now demonstrate their possibility and reality in his person. Thus, this teaching concludes the same way as Matthew’s other use of the “easier” device: “When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded, and said, ‘Then who can be saved?’ But Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible’” (19:25-26).

The Son of God has author-ity on earth because the Son is God, is the Author, and all things are possible for the Author because the Author writes all that is, defines what is, IS all that is. So Jesus brings that reality which is possible in God into existence because it is in him and him alone, as Son of God, that the author-ity to do so exists.

Jesus’ healing of the paralytic is meant to make manifest that author-ity: “But so that you may know....” While it still seems that the healing is only tentatively linked to the forgiveness, I think it might need to remain this way, or, at least, I am still working through what physical disability means in the kingdom of God. I think there may be something to the point I made earlier, about Jesus not doing things to prove a point, but because it is the most human thing to do...

A friend of mine recently shared some of his reflections with me on Mark’s (and Luke’s) version of the story. He writes:

“And Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the man- 'your sins are forgiven'” (Mark 2:5). Not exactly what we expect, is it? Well, it's not what the crowd expected either. It goes on to say that the scribes and “church people” there got really upset. “How can he forgive sins? Who does he think he is?” It's not until Jesus heals him physically that the onlookers are satisfied. In fact, it says “they were full of wonder and gave glory to God!” I wish we could see the world the way Jesus does. See, because the funny thing to me is we never hear any complaints from the cripple. Jesus forgave his sins! I mean, how cool is that? Just think, everything you've ever done wrong, big or small, all of it gone. No more guilt, no more pain. No more aching deep in your soul. You've spent your whole life lying on a bed of shame, and the Creator of the world looked into your eyes and took it all away. He smiled at you, and in that moment – that lifetime of frustration in your heart is replaced with peace. I think in that moment, the cripple realized that Jesus didn't see anything wrong with him. He had faith, and so to Jesus, he was good as new.

I think this is a beautiful insight. It transforms Jesus’ “know” (in “but so that you may know”) to something more than knowledge, at least knowledge as we tend to think of it, because it is a knowledge that itself brings healing in that it brings people into the knowledge of, and thus into participation in, the kingdom of God. The healing of the paraplegic actually does more to heal the people around him than it does for the man himself. He’s already been made whole in the forgiveness and the unconditional acceptance offered and found in the eyes of Jesus.

We need not necessarily posit some relationship between forgiveness and physical healing. Jesus even warns against trying to do so in John 9:1-3 and speaks of healing in this same way: “so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” In both John and Matthew, the bodies of these individuals are transformed from signs of brokenness in a world that knows only of impossibility (even if it lives in denial of it) to signs of promise that point to and themselves bespeak the kingdom in revealing the power and sovereignty, the author-ity, of God.

And, for the moment anyways, the people rejoice in the presence of the kingdom: “When the crowds saw it, they were filled with awe, and they glorified God, who had given such authority to human beings” (9:8). They have felt, vicariously through this man’s restored body, the healing touch of God. And they have the right response: wonder and praise, not blame and self-preservation, but awe and the glorification of God. But we hear no more of the scribes. Jesus’ response has appropriately silenced their charges, but we hear nothing of their joining in the glorification of God, and so they slip off-screen and the tension remains, and builds.

And just to cover all the bases, I do not think we need to feel discomfort at the crowds interpretation that God had “given such authority to human beings,” for this is precisely what Jesus is. And, what is more, it is through Jesus that such authority is given to human beings, since those who confess to be his body in being “church,” who share in his blood and body at Eucharist, have been promised (as has all humanity) and have received his Spirit and therefore share in his author-ity.

And so this is the mission of the church, this is the possibility that God has called the church to make a reality: healing and forgiveness. By the power of the Spirit, we participate in that author-ity, and so are given the responsibility, the charge, the great co-mission of authoring the kingdom of God in this world. But let us not ever believe that we have this author-ity of our own accord, that it is anything but gift. And let us bring ourselves as we truly are, in all our brokenness (or willingness to become broken) to Jesus, that He may author the kingdom in our hearts and in our skin.

{ healing and forgiveness, part III }

2009-12-11T17:05:00.007+01:00

Then some of the scribes said to themselves, “This man is blaspheming.”

****

I have been avoiding writing these last two reflections. Despite having given this verse a lot of reflection, and having discussed it with a few friends, I have yet to come to a place where this exchange makes any sense. I actually started this series on my blog because I thought by writing it out, by forcing myself to make something tangible of the muddle that was in my head, I could at least come to a place where the story was meaningful, even if I had to acknowledge that meaning as, for the moment, shallow.

Part of the reason this passage has been so difficult is because it seems as if Matthew is cramming so much into this exchange: forgiveness, healing, authority, blasphemy. These topics are manageable enough in their own right, in isolation, but having a text that weaves them together this tightly just seems to confuse things, to confuse categories. For how does healing prove the authority to forgive sins and thus refute an accusation of blasphemy that likely missed the mark in the first place!?

Maybe following the story piece by piece will help to make sense of it, let the story tell itself. Maybe the confusion results from having read the story too quickly too many times, having collapsed it in and over on itself, instead of following after it...

After Jesus’ proclamation that the paralytic’s sins are forgiven, some scribes appear and make the accusation, amongst themselves, of blasphemy. Scribes and pharisees often show up in the gospels as narrative foils; they appear not only to clarify what has just happened, but allow that action to come to fulfillment. This not only functions on a small scale in their side-stage conspiracies and accusations, but also, in a certain sense, on a large scale, moving the whole of the gospels, and thus, the whole of Jesus’ life, towards crucifixion.

But this does not mean they are shallow or empty foils, for they are not exactly strangers or random passersby. These are the religious authorities, the ones well-versed in Scripture, those who have given their lives to understanding Torah and practicing righteousness. Whatever may be said for them (in what they strive for and what they have accomplished), or against them (in their apparent blindness to Jesus as the true end and fulfillment of these), I think it would be safe to say the scribes and pharisees reveal and represent us, especially in our own religiosity.

I timidly include that last “especially” clause, because I think we may lose something vital if we write-off the scribes and pharisees as merely the manifestations of a religion gone shallow and legalistic. These are people. If we read them as mere plot devices then we lose their humanity, and we are no longer reading of our brothers and sisters, but of moral imperatives and generalizations. (Could this be related to the reductionism of language to logic, where the specificities are stripped away to get to the ‘essence’ of the sentence, the “Xa”? Could this be related to how to we talk about issues in the church like homosexuality when we talk about it solely as a doctrinal concept and forget that we are talking about people, and therefore that we must talk to and with those people?)

And so, if we regard the scribes as mere plot devices here, they can no longer be us. They can be “tendencies” or “faults,” sure, but they are no longer strong enough or alive enough to truly confront us with ourselves. We may acknowledge the tendencies or faults they represent in our actions, but those “problems” never radically challenge our person, who we say we are. As mere foils, their blindness or callousness is not tied up with their identity, with their life. And so we do not count their words as ours, for how could we even share a language with such abstractions? (And if we do this to the scribes and the pharisees, is there not also the very real possibility that we do this to Jesus?)

It would seem then that we could look at the scribe’s reaction with two ends in mind: 1) to find ourselves in them, that is, in their words, and 2) to understand how their reaction explains and/or moves this act to its completion. And while I would love to skip ahead to the latter (mostly because I do not understand their reaction), I’m not sure an answer would be full - or human - enough without the former. Nor do I think Jesus’ response would cut deep enough if we leave him confronting mere plot devices and “tendencies” rather than human beings. So I will focus on the first end in this post, and close out this series with the latter in the next.

So why call blasphemy?

The initial and common response, that Jesus is blaspheming because he is forgiving sins, is complicated by the fact that he does not expressly identify himself in the act of forgiveness. At first read, it even seems difficult to call it an “act” of forgiveness at all, because Jesus does not say “I forgive you,” but rather, “your sins are forgiven.” Their is no subject acting, no one doing the forgiving, there is the object (“your sins”) and a description (“are forgiven”).

Now we could grant the scribes the conclusions reached in the previous post, that in his pronouncement, Jesus is claiming for himself that divine presence which makes manifest the reality of the Kingdom, and thus, the reality of forgiveness; that Jesus’ pronouncement of forgiveness is the claim to be the God in whose presence forgiveness is found. And while this claim to divinity, if false, would surely be grounds for an accusation of blasphemy, I do not think this is what is going on.

If we are trying to find our feet with the scribes, trying to understand how their words could be found in our mouths as well, then if we grant them this insight as grounds for their reaction we must grant ourselves that same insight and then move from there to see how or why we would respond with that same accusation of blasphemy. The admittedly vague and lofty theological insight would have to be the starting point.

This seems failed from the beginning, not only because I am not quite sure of the validity or of my own conclusion, but because coming to this text as Christians, we approach the text already confessing that Jesus’ claim to divinity is not blasphemy but truth. And anyways, it is from a common humanity and way of life that we hope to understand the scribe’s accusation, not from a common theological claim (though we do, obviously, share a theology with them that is grounds for our way of life).

While I said before that I thought to claim the scribe’s charge of blasphemy in reaction to Jesus’ act of forgiveness was problematic, I did not say it was wrong. And while I also said that I just needed to follow the story as it is told to understand it, I do not know how to make sense of the scribes' charge without the insights provided by Jesus’ response. I don’t think this move is all too problematic, seeing that we affirm that Jesus’ words help us to better know ourselves, since Jesus is closer to us than we are to ourselves. So why not allow Jesus’ response to the scribes to provide that same act of exhuming and illuminating the selves from which these words come?

The point of Jesus response that I want to focus on here, in order to understand the scribes' charge of blasphemy, is the phrase, “But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins...” (v.6a). In conjunction with this phrase, it may help to remind ourselves of the crowd’s reaction to the sermon on the mount: “the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes” (Mat. 7:28b-29).

So, what is Matthew doing here by twice bringing Jesus’ “authority” into conflict with the scribes? A little Greek might help. In both these passages from Matthew, the word for authority is “exousia,” which is made up of “ex” (out of) and “ousia” (essence or being). So exousia means doing something out of, or from, one’s being. The verb often gets translated “authority,” but to better see its meaning in English, it may help to write it, “author-ity.” Jesus authors his own words, his words and acts come from himself, his being, which is the self he has been given by, and which is of, the Father.

It is no coincidence then that both times Matthew speaks of Jesus’ author-ity, he brings this into contrast with the scribes, who were only to explain and expound on what had already been authored in scripture. In Matthew 7, it is not said that Jesus taught with a different authority, but simply with authority, which is not how the scribes taught. The point is not that Jesus’ presentation is so self-assured and dogmatic in contrast to the teaching of the scribes, if anything the case was likely the other way around, the probability of which should guard us against such a reading.

The point is that Jesus authors his own words (which, in his being God incarnate, are the same words of the God of the Hebrew scriptures). Jesus need not cite the holy books to declare the reality of forgiveness because he is the embodiment and fulfillment of that book as the Word of God. Jesus is both the Author and that which is eternally authored.

And the scribes, as through a mirror darkly, see some flickering of that claim in Jesus’ words. They catch some glimpse that Jesus’ pronouncement of forgiveness bespeaks a deeper authority. But in their (and our) assumption that we fully understand ourselves and go through life attempting to understand the mysterious other, they displace the problem.

It is my suspicion then, that the scribe’s accusation of blasphemy results from hearing Jesus’ words as the usurpation of the authority that they themselves have wrongly assumed. It is not that Jesus is expressly claiming authority, it is that he is implicitly re-claiming that authority.

The ear that hears Jesus’ pronouncement of forgiveness as “blasphemy” is the keen and distorting ear of those who, in the back of their minds, know they sit not rightly on the throne. Or it is the sensitive and frustrated ear of those who, sleepy and comfortable in their day dreams of respectability and prestige, wish to quiet the reality that speaks differently.

So the scribes call “blasphemy,” quietly and amongst themselves, because Jesus’ (implicit and rightful) claim to author-ity reminds them of their own. This is why the scribe’s have a particular insight into what is going on here, for they see their own claiming of authority in Jesus. And thus, they see their own guilt in Jesus. This is the displacement: they see their history playing itself out before them and the indictment which they cannot levy against themselves because it is too heavy, too heinous, is now directed outward, against the one who rightly claims the throne, against the true Author-ity.

Why do they make this accusation quietly, amongst themselves? Could it be otherwise? Could they really verbalize the claim that, in its voicing, might show them guilty as well? Maybe this is to their credit, for maybe it shows that at some level they know that a public accusation would only reveal themselves, that it would be to cry murder with blood on one’s own hands. Or maybe it is just cowardice. Maybe it is just easier to condemn the sinner in private without fear of correction. Jesus has only begun his ministry, and the scribes (and the Pharisees) have not yet built up the indignation and brazenness it takes to hide oneself (from the eyes of others, and even, and especially, from one’s own eyes).

Perhaps this is where we can find ourselves with the scribes. Perhaps here, in the need to protect the selves we have aggrandized, and in the need to displace the guilt of our usurpation, of claiming author-ity, we can understand their whispered accusation.

How we hear Jesus’ words, as forgiveness or as accusation, may depend on the kind of person we bring to Jesus: one broken and vulnerable, dependent on others, or one that claims the author-ity to write our own story, and even the stories of others. Perhaps it is always an admixture. Perhaps we need to be told we are "thinking evil" by Jesus in order to acknowledge the brokenness that allows Jesus' words of forgiveness to work their miracles, to be open to the authoring hand of God.

So then...how does the story end?

{ healing and forgiveness, part II }

2009-12-07T22:27:00.004+01:00

When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.”

****

So this is where I start to lose the story; as soon as Jesus acts, as soon as he but speaks, the narrative thread starts to unravel. For these words do not seem to fit, if we are honest. This is not the expected turn of phrase. To come all this way, to carry a paralyzed man on a mat all the way to the shore! or, rather, to have one’s broken body paraded through town, with curious eyes, all-too-perceptive eyes seeing more than your body, but seeing the inability which shames and defeats you daily, just to arrive and to then receive what? Forgiveness? But what of healing!?

Jesus has directed his attention (or at least his words) to the paralytic alone, and the action focuses in on this exchange for just half a verse. It is as though Matthew did not think these strange words needed explaining, or maybe the explaining is yet to come by way of the scribes...

But as the story stands at this moment, I think what is most shocking is that what is offered by Jesus, what is proclaimed on that shore, is not this man’s physical healing, but the forgiveness of his sins. And therein lies another point of confusion:

Is Jesus actually forgiving him or is he stating what is merely already the case?

In the Greek (and in the vast majority of translations), Jesus is not saying “I forgive you.” Jesus does not technically put himself anywhere in the equation, he seems to be merely stating a fact. But is this to imply his words are any less effective, that by merely stating a proposition - something that philosophers of a certain tradition could reduce to symbolic logic (Xa) - Jesus has stopped short of actually doing anything effective?

But I think it is we who stop short, not Jesus, if we take his words as merely designative or assertive. That one could stick Jesus’ words into a formula might not make them less true, but it would make them meaningless (and what is truth without meaning?). This is because we find meaning between us, in that common space that we occupy but do not and never could fill. It is because meaning exists here and is shared between us that we do not own or determine the meaning of our words.

My words are not packages in which I must wrap my meaning in order to give that meaning to you. We inherited our words (and their meaning) when we inherited our world (of meaning); we can no more determine the meaning of a word on our own than we could lay claim to our own private world (which is not to say these are not done, but that they are illusions). So to put Jesus’ expression (and most, if not all, of our ordinary expressions for that matter) into a formula is to remove that expression from the space between people, to say that the true essence, the true meaning of the expression, does not depend on that space or those people.

So returning to Jesus’ words to the paralytic, what seems to be happening is neither Jesus’ offering of his forgiveness, nor a banal assertion of facts. For how can one “take heart” in an equation? Rather, the paralytic is to take heart because Jesus is declaring an ultimate reality that, in that very declaration, alters the experienced reality.

By way of analogy (but beautifully more than!) Jesus saying “your sins are forgiven” is like the abolitionist who says to the newly-freed-slave, “you are free.” The abolitionist’s words did not loose the physical chains, they did not affect the rights of ownership, but in making this new reality real-ized, are those words not truly effectual? Are those words, repeated a thousand times to blinking, tearing eyes, not liberating? For isn’t it having those words now exist outside one’s own head, having those words now enter that space between where reality and meaning truly exist, to find those words in the mouth of another, to have that which was almost rejected because it sounded so ridiculous, dreamt, be confirmed and acknowledged by another, is not this what we need in order to believe? Is not this what we need for meaning to take root, for truth to be not known, but acknowledged?

Jesus radically changes this man’s reality, for Jesus’ pronouncement is the breaking-in of a new Kingdom. And so Jesus’ words are a declaration of freedom, offered to one who had offered himself, in all his brokenness and vulnerability, to the possibility and reality that Jesus was and is. The mystery of Jesus is that he is not merely the one who declares the reality of forgiveness, but is the one through and by whom that forgiveness comes. Jesus simply is that forgiveness. In his physical person, in the reality of God’s human existence, Jesus is forgiveness. To be in the presence of Jesus is to be forgiven.

This is a truth to be acknowledged, a meaning to be found in the presence of Jesus. So would not Jesus’ saying, “your sins are forgiven” be as for him to say, “I am here, you are with me”? Would not all of us need to “take heart” in such a presence? And what is more, for Jesus to say “your sins are forgiven” is to say who that “I” is which is there present, for it is to collapse into a singularity presence and forgiveness.

And perhaps it is that faith which Jesus saw, the acknowledgment of brokenness and human vulnerability, which gave Jesus hope that his words, that forgiveness, could be acknowledged, shared. Which is to say, hope that he would be acknowledged, shared. And hope that in this broken man the Kingdom, in a small but incomprehensible way, may be realized, between people, the only way it can be.

I do not think I have yet sufficiently answered my own discomfort at why there is not a physical healing. But I think this is a start, in that there is something profound about Jesus’ words here that this reflection has hopefully served to bring a flickering candle to. Hopefully there will be more to come...

{ healing and forgiveness, part I }

2009-12-01T00:48:00.006+01:00

And after getting into a boat he crossed the sea and came to his own town. And just then some people were carrying a paralyzed man lying on a bed. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.” Then some of the scribes said to themselves, “This man is blaspheming.” But Jesus, perceiving their thoughts, said, “Why do you think evil in your hearts? For which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”--he then said to the paralytic--”Stand up, take your bed and go to your home.” And he stood up and went to his home. When the crowds saw it, they were filled with awe, and they glorified God, who had given such authority to human beings. - Matthew 9:1-8

****

So I have been struggling with these verses on and off for about six months now. What follows is a series of sketches where I’ve tried to make sense of this from a few different perspectives, and to arrange those sketches in a way that might help me, or any one else who stumbles across this sketchbook, to be able to see the landscape more clearly. I have a feeling my vision is still too limited to be able to take in this landscape, but here it is for what it’s worth.

I do not know why the NRSV opts for “carrying” when the Greek seems clearly to be more intentional, more closely connected in meaning with “to offer” or “to bring” than “to haul.” The Greek even follows the verb with the prepositional phrase “to him.” The act is purposeful and it is directed at Jesus. Now Jesus’ healing ministry has only just begun (the leper, the centurion’s servant, Peter’s mother-in-law and “many” who showed up thereafter, and the Garadene demoniacs), but apparently the news is spreading. So here we have a small act, a lone act - though not carried out alone - in Jesus’ home town. There are no crowds waiting like they had been outside of Peter’s mother-in-law’s house. Had they heard of the pigs running off the cliff and chose to keep their distance?

We are left with one of two (if not both) baffling questions: “Why are these people alone?” or” Why is there no one else beside them?”

Is it with either of these two questions that we are directed then (by the text) to see as Jesus? For though the text does not call much attention to it, it is there, wedged between Jesus and forgiveness: faith. “When Jesus saw their faith...” This is the second time that faith has been viewed communally in Matthew, though the first time was negative (“Ye of little faith”) and directed against the disciples during the storm at sea (Mat. 8:23). (One might even see the first mention of faith as directed negatively against all of Israel in Mat. 8:10, such that "the disciples" would be synechdochal for all Israel).

So we find faith here when we lacked it just a moment before at sea. We find faith walking with a body that must depend, that must trust; and a body that reminds us of our own fragility - and even mortality - in its brokenness and dependence, for it is a body that if left alone would perish. And we find this faith right after it had been absent on the seas, consumed or lost in fear of our fragility, our mortality. On the sea we cried out from this fear of mortality, pleading for the Miraculous One to make it go away, to shield us from it. But here, here the vulnerability is not hidden, it is lifted up, carried on a mat through city streets, and there is no crowd to block our view or distract us.

So between Jesus and forgiveness, there is the acceptance of human vulnerability and the bringing, the offering of that humanity to Jesus. And Jesus saw their faith...

{ a reflection on the creation museum, part III }

2009-11-14T13:36:00.004+01:00

Once the Creation museum had driven the wedge as far as possible between human reason and God’s Word, once its audience was convinced that a science devoid of scripture led inevitably to the blasphemous claims of Galileo, I mean Darwin, the next logical step (or rather, evangelical step, since we’re not relying on logical human reason anymore) was to make evident what a world devoid of scripture inevitably leads to.

Just outside the next exhibit, standing at the gates of hell, you’re confronted with a sobering picture. A man stands with a dirtied shovel beside a newly filled grave; the tombstone simply reads “God is Dead.” (Isn’t that a bit ambiguous though? Is he supposed to be burying Nietzsche or God? And would it be presumptive of me to think that most people in the museum wouldn’t make that connection with the former?) Further up the cemetery hill, four other tombstones dot the lawn: “Truth,” “God’s Word,” “Genesis,” a then, finally, a lone cross atop the peak. (It is interesting to note that all of this is in a little alcove devoted to denouncing Charles Templeton...)

So this is the world we are about to enter, the world where truth is dead, where God’s Word and Genesis and Jesus are all dead (and that’s redundant in more ways than one). Having come from the stark bifurcation of faith and reason, you have no other conclusion to make than that the hellacious reality you are about to experience is a glimpse into the world of human reason. The world left to Darwin (or Charles Templeton?).

What does this non-world look like? How do you represent a world that God has left because it has left God? Well, you apparently make it look - and sound - like the fear-filled upper- and middle-class nightmares of the inner-city. The Creation Museum wants you to know that the best picture we have of a world devoid of God and scripture is the inner-city. The walls, graffitied and plastered with newspaper clippings of atrocities and murders and homosexuals, are lit only in red as the sirens scream through the overhead speakers. God is obviously not to be found here. For this is what happens to a world that believes in evolution...?

What effect does this room have, besides the obvious perpetuation of upper- and middle-class fears of poor people, of equating wealth and security with blessing and godliness, of making an absurd connection between evolution and poverty? Well, as if those aren’t bad enough, it enacts (both in the sense of performing and, more importantly here, of authorizing or imposing) a distance between the museum goer and the exhibit.

No one who can afford a $26 ticket will identify with this world. This is the “godless world” that most of us only come into contact with, with car doors locked and rolling stops, or when it is safely brought into our homes on the nightly news report. The exhibit’s dramatization elicits a intense, if only subconscious, “thank God this isn’t me” (ref. Luke 18:11).

I’m not sure what the intent of this room is. I have a hard time believing that fear is not at the root of this display, intended both for the Christian (creationist) and non-Christian (evolutionist) museum goer. For the former, it elicits a fear of “back-sliding,” of the world they will surely enter, a world seen only in crime reports and nightmares, if they give up on the Word of God, that is, if they start to give into evolutionism. For the latter, the message is similar: this is the world you are both moving towards and bringing into being yourself in your rejection of the (scientific) truth of Scripture. It asks of the evolutionists, “Is this the world you want? Don’t you see what a rejection of (our reading of) Scripture makes of the world!?”

(I do not think it to be taking this exhibit too far to make this connection. Its express purpose is to represent a world that has refused to start with scripture in making sense of itself. But the veil is thin. This “scriptureless-hell” comes right on the heals of the bifurcation of human reason and God’s Word, where the former leads inevitably to evolution and the latter to creationism. And then there is the graveyard where Genesis is buried just beneath the cross. The sequence is in plain sight: If you reject the creationism inherent in God’s Word, you are left with nothing but evolution; and all of scripture and all of God is thereby dead to you; and this now, this unholy (inner-) city is the world you will create and inhabit.)

Upon leaving the inner-city (the “World Without Scripture”) you are able to relax as you now find yourself in the familiar - and blessedly quiet - suburbs. The sirens and screaming fade and the red lights are but a dim glow behind you now as you walk onto the lawn of a quaint ranch-style home that has been constructed against the far wall. This is the “Home Without Scripture.”

In every window, a TV plays a looped video, each TV portraying a particular consequence of a home life devoid of God’s Word (and again, the connection isn’t hard to make, a home that has rejected creationism). One shows a teenage girl in her room, crying on the phone to her friend because she has found out she is pregnant (which makes you wonder if you are still in the godless world, where new, God-given life is a burden and a curse, rather than a blessing...). Another shows two women gossiping at the kitchen table while the husband is in the next room watching the game and drinking a beer (I wouldn’t suppose that the implied division of gender roles is what they meant to point out as sinful; maybe it’s just that they’re not doing what they should be doing in their given spheres...).

Parenthetical comments aside, a charitable reading would say this particular exhibit is meant to convict the museum goer, to bring to light just how their own home life is in need of a more solid scriptural foundation. It is meant ask, possibly, “Is this your home? Does any of this look familiar?” Perhaps this exhibit is meant to open up space for acknowledgment, for confession and repentance.

I have a hard time with this reading, not in relation to the museum’s intent, but in regards to what this display actually accomplishes. Coming out of hell, out of the scripture-less world of the inner-city, the museum goer is in no position to identify with manifestations of sin. In fact, the horrors of the inner-city have had the complete opposite effect of catalyzing, and thereby ensuring, a disconnect between exhibit and viewer.

One comes to the home with that self-same distance he or she learned, or was given, in hell. The TVs in the “broken home exhibit” do not confront viewers with images they are willing to call their own, but rather the TVs proximity to hell has subjected them to demon possession, and so they flicker forth damnable shame.

In sum, one does not approach the house with the willingness or ability to humbly call it their own; instead, one approaches it as a voyeuristic god, consumed in idle pity and glad that he, at least, is above the fray.

And so, the visitor walks on and comes to the witnessing room, the room that asks, “You have seen the world without God’s Word, is it yours? You have seen the home without God’s Word, is it yours? Now look into your own heart, is God’s Word absent there too?” Again, where there might have been space for conviction, confession, repentance, I fear there is only self-justification: “No, that is not my world! No, that is not my home! Surely, I have been blessed to have Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior - he who has kept me and mine (the one’s I choose to call mine) pure and holy.”

And so salvation is brought to share the same truth value as creationism. Just as the Genesis account of creation is mere scientific fact, a story that tells us something about the world but nothing about God, so too is salvation a thing in the world, another fact among facts. It is something that is assertable and verifiable in propositional form: “I am saved.” There is nothing (at this point) about this statement which makes it any different from “Bananas are yellow.” It is a quality God gives you, like blue eyes. So really, to ask how you could be a struggling Christian would be as nonsensical as asking how you could be bad at having blue eyes.

The Truth is no longer an identity we grow into (the Life), or a path we walk (the Way), but merely a formula we assent to that holds certain obligations over us. “If I believe in Christ then I need to go to church and be a good person” is no more significant that concluding from the belief in mathematics that when I add 2 and 2, I need to get 4.

Standing in this room that is meant to witness to the glory and mystery of salvation, one stands still in the shadows of those tombstones (which read “God’s Word,” “Genesis,” “Truth”). The shadows stretch even here, and here are darkest - for the hells that we have seen so far have been forsaken not by God, but by us alone; whereas here, here the shadow of death seeks to claim the only thing we know to call hope.

But unaware of the shadows that linger still, and with the assurance of holiness and salvation in hand (fully within one’s grasp, no doubt, and so why mourn the loss of hope?), one then goes on to learn the science of creation, the fall of humanity and the no less scientific results of sin in the world (appearance of carnivores, bacteria, venom, and poisons), and finally the flood and the world’s subsequent geological and biological changes.

Where there are gaps that would push science too far (that is, where imagination - or manipulation - couldn’t provide a believable answer), one is assured that all things are possible with God (for example, the excessively rapid evolution of horses after the flood that would seemingly make it impossible to have any generational coherence for using the word “horse”). The science is shoddy, but vague and confusing enough to be convincing, and surely no one would want to say such things are not possible with God.

I don’t think there is any use debating creationism on scientific terms. Each side will accuse the other of faulty science, and most often, the creationist is armed with more tidbits of (pseudo-) science which most of us who don’t have a scientific background will be unable to adequately refute (and even those who do are seldom heeded). The ground where discussion and dialogue need to take place is what it means to call Scripture "true." The question goes back to hermeneutics, of what it means to call something meaningful, and where and how that meaning might be found.

And it precisely because creationism robs Scripture of so much meaning, flattening it out to a series of propositions about the world, that I think such conversations need to happen - and maybe happen in a less aggressive way than I have been able to manage here, but happen nonetheless. So I leave it here, for what its worth.

{ a reflection on the creation museum, part II }

2009-11-12T22:32:00.002+01:00

And now we come to the hermeneutical problem, the question of how one interprets a text or makes sense of the world.

Take for example the film, The God’s Must Be Crazy. To one group (the bushmen), the glass bottle is seen as a gift from the gods, even if its an evil gift. To them, the bottle did not so much bring out their worst qualities, but rather exercised an evil power over them that made them behave unnaturally. (Thus, to get rid of the bottle was to get rid of the evil that it had brought into the community.) On the other hand, to ‘modern man’, the bottle is merely a by-product from a consumer good. To them, the bottle has no divine power, does not influence how they act. The pilot that drops it out the airplane’s window in the beginning of the film gets rid of it not because it is evil, but because it is worthless.

Here, in a sense, we have two different hermeneutics (that of the bushmen and that of ‘modern man’) interacting with a single text (the coke bottle). Both communities make sense of the bottle in a way that is informed by their interaction with it. They both are forced, in a certain sense, to make sense of this object in their world. The pilot tosses it out his window because it’s worthless. And isn’t it? Isn’t it just a product of consumption, but not even that, a container for the product which is to be consumed? But the bushmen call it evil, and it makes us watching the movie laugh a bit, but wasn’t it? Didn’t its presence turn the community against itself?

To both sets of questions the answer is obviously “yes” and “no,” but that gets things a bit off-track. What is important here, is that here you have as much of an “objective” text as you can get: a glass bottle. And yet! And yet there is interpretation, both communities understand this bottle in two very different ways, what that bottle means is utterly different for those two groups. Neither one of them consciously looked at that bottle with a “method” or a “theory” in mind. But that’s not to say there isn’t a theory, a hermeneutic, it just means we’ve so internalized most of our perspectives that we don’t go around every day having to figure out what each little thing we interact with “really means.”

And that’s both good and bad. On one hand, it’s simply life, it’s just how we go about the day, and there’s not much changing that. You couldn’t really get on with living if you had to stop and examine your unconscious perspective at every turn. On the other, its some of these deeply internalized perspectives that get us into trouble, that make it hard to recognize our racism, or be able to see a Big Mac in a different light than just a quick meal, or to rethink what beauty really is. And this is why theologians, pastors, philosophers, artists, protestors, neighbors, and co-workers sometimes take up the task of getting us to look critically at some of our unexamined perspectives, our internalized hermeneutics.

And because there always is a hermeneutic, because we are ever and always (and for the most part subconsciously) interpreting the world, the question we finally arrive at is whether or not our hermeneutics are an attempt to see the world as God does. (Which is NOT to say, to have some grand objective perspective.)

So now, if we take the analogy from The God’s Must Be Crazy into Kentucky’s Creation Museum, the light on those shiny displays begins to look a bit different.

One of the most interesting things about the Creation Museum is that it wanted to say there are different (read: 2) ways to look at the physical “objective” world, but only one way to look at the Bible. As noted in the previous post, the two ways to make sense of the world are through God’s Word or through human reason. But doesn’t that sound like saying there are two ways to interpret a Coke bottle and only one way to interpret Shakespeare?

What they then went on to try to show was that human reason will lead you to evolution while scripture will lead you to modern evangelical creationism. So, a few things about that.

First, I guess we are left to conclude that all those godless scientist and philosophers (and let’s be honest, even supposedly “Christian” ones) before Darwin (read: for the majority of human history) just didn’t know how to use human reason properly, or weren’t using it at all, seeing that human reason didn’t even conceive of evolution till the 1800s. What was Thales using when he said the universe was made of water? Or Galileo when he said the sun was at the center of our solar system? Ouija boards? Chicken bones?

Second, but with the first, it’s funny how, for thousands of years, the Jewish people have had Genesis and have yet to come to the conclusion of the creationist. Being Christian seems pretty irrelevant here, right? It’s not as if there is a single mention of Christ in the theory, he’s pretty unimportant at this point I guess (funny, he wasn’t for John...). But lets give the theory a chance, maybe you need Jesus to really understand what Genesis actually means. I guess that would explain why the Catholics didn’t get it right for 1500 years? But Luther even missed the point. And Calvin. And Wesley. Well, I’m glad we finally have real Christians in the year 2000 that can actually hear the Good Word for what it is.

So where does this reading of the Bible come from (besides from Jesus, obviously)? While I don’t want to go into the whole convoluted history (oh, and is there ever one!), I do want to point out a little contradiction at the heart of it all. Namely, while modern evangelical creationism wants to completely denounce human reason as a starting point for thinking about the world, and concomitantly, denounce the godless human sciences that human reason has spawned, it is holding up science as the yardstick by which to judge the truthfulness of the Bible. Let me try to make that clearer.

You would be amazed at the science this place put on display. There were so many displays, TVs, graphs, and words long enough to rival the German language, that anyone who wasn’t completely skeptical or didn’t have a background in science would have been pretty convinced if merely for the sake of being unable to refute it. Example: “Humans have come in contact with lots of animals , like crocodiles and coelacanths, but they aren’t buried with humans.” Of course, coelacanths...those um, yeah, sure, that’s a good point...I think...what the eff is a coelacanth? I won’t even go into the floating forests...

I guess that was a bit beside the point, though it kind of goes back to my point in the previous post about having to appear “valid,” which is a concept that matters very much here. For the creationist, the Genesis account has to be read as a scientific account to be true, for it to be a valid text. The only way for Genesis to be meaningful is for it to be scientific at heart. Any other reading would leave you having to rely on the godless evolutionary scientists for an account of how the universe came into existence. Or so the claim goes.

So I hope the contradiction has become clear: Creationism denounces science while saying that the truth of Genesis lies its scientific reading. Reading Genesis as an a scientific account is not then, the rejection of human reason, it is the unwitting idolization of it, or at least, of our current social and epistemological perspective and what we mean by “truth.”

When did scripture become more a story about us and less a story about God?

And while creationists may not want to say that scientific creationism is all that the Genesis story is, the tenacity with which creationism is defended and propagated in conservative evangelical circles makes it difficult for me to see how the scientific reading is not, at the end of the day, what they hold to be the most important, the most in need of defending and vocalizing. If the beauty of the Genesis story and the mysteries it reveal about God are not wholly lost or disregarded in scientific creationism, they are definitely in need of renewed emphasis.

{ a reflection on the creation museum, part I }

2009-11-10T23:54:00.007+01:00

The brown state signs indicating that we were indeed approaching Kentucky’s “Answers in Genesis, Creation Museum” caught me a bit off-guard, not because it wasn’t our plan to go, but because of my overly comic expectations of a “museum” in someone’s doublewide with accompanying lawn-sculptures of grazing T-Rexs and Adam and Even hand-feeding velociraptors. I didn’t foresee state road signs.

But validity comes in a certain package.

And so, after exiting the highway, we drove through the gate in the stone wall with the sculpted metal triceratops atop it, were directed in the parking lot by a state trooper, and then walked up to the huge glass-fronted crescent of the anything-but-a-double-wide Creation Museum. The price-tag was legitimate too, $26 per person (w/tax). But my girl-friend and I, rounding out a pretty fantastic road-trip, decided it would be worth it, if only (and likely only) for the priceless memories.

I should probably put my theological cards on the table at this point. I have lots of them (you collect them like baseball cards at seminary, I even have a few signed). But to the one that seems most pertinent: I do not ascribe to modern evangelical ‘creationism’ - the belief that the Genesis narrative is the literal scientific account of the creation of the universe, fall, and flood. I say “seems most pertinent,” because this opinion rests ultimately on a certain hermeneutic, which is a fancy word for the theory or method behind how you read a text, or how you make sense of the world. I am purposefully avoiding the word “interpretation,” because one of the claims typically (but not always) made by proponents of creationism is that they are not interpreting, but just reading what is there - that, they say, is their only “method.” I’ll come back to this in the second post.

So, in all honesty, I went in knowing that upon leaving, my mind would not be changed on the matter. That is not to say I didn’t think I might learn something, but what I learned ended up being more frustrating and disheartening than edifying (and in a much deeper and different sense - I hope - than an “academic elite” might be thought to feel in view of the beliefs of the “common Christian.”) Let me explain.

After passing a few glass cases that pose some ‘interesting conundrums’, meant to get you thinking about how the world really came to be, you come to the first main exhibit. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to correctly refer to most of these exhibits because the museum provides no online map of their facility and their website either overlooked mentioning a good number of sections (those focused primarily on witnessing), or simply lumped them into the “Natural Selection is not Evolution” exhibit. True to form, the museum here utilizes a common evangelical witnessing tactic: the bait-and-switch. The museum first publicly presents itself as solely addressing the scientific validity of “biblical history,” and then, once you’ve paid your $26, presents Scripture as the key not only to the Earth’s past, but to your personal salvation. And it is the goal of this first exhibit, and the next several, to drive this latter point home.

The question put to you in this first room is simple: God’s Word or human reason? Here is where hermeneutics come into play. The question they are posing is whether you use God’s Word (the Bible) or human reason to make sense of the world, of how it got here and why it is the way it is. And here lies the root of the problem of modern evangelical creationism, a root that lies hidden because what good, self-respecting Christian would question for a moment that he or she should begin with anything but God’s Word? The problem is two-fold. First, the unnecessary and deleterious bifurcation of faith and reason. Second, the assumed and unquestionable (and thus hidden) biblical hermeneutic of modern creationism. I hope to shed some light on the first part of this problem in this first post (of hopefully three).

First, allocating faith and reason to their own separate realms in which to operate has a long history and has had both theological and political implications. What is pertinent here is that, in the modern era, the division meant that any and all public discourse had to be conducted on rational grounds without appeals to faith. With that, faith communities (or at least, talk about their faith) were forced, to some degree, out of the public sphere, since their justifications were not universal to all mankind. You had (publicly) “pure reason” and (privately) “pure faith.”

But what has taken place over the last few decades, especially in America, is that those faith communities are now demanding their voices be heard and legitimized by those very powers they feel have tried to silence them in political matters. Hence in both the US and the Middle East, many religious conservatives lash out against governmental powers that do not acknowledge or appeal to religion in public debate or policy. But what often happens, and what results in “liberals” calling foul, is that while “conservatives” want to influence public policy, they argue from a faith that belongs to them alone.

Truth cannot have a foot in each. A house divided cannot stand.

But the division is illusory.

The limits of reason do not show it ultimately defective, but, in the eyes of faith, are the opening for speaking of God. And speaking of God will, at times, turn what we thought was reasonable on its head, and blessedly so. But in the end, what is holy is the fulfillment, not the rejection, of what is natural, including our “reason.”

So, back to the exhibit. That simple question (“God’s Word or human reason?”) can be seen as arising from the exorcism of reason from faith in an attempt to keep faith “pure,” undefiled. The house can’t be divided if you kick-out the competition. What was missed though, is that “human reason” isn’t competition.

But because human reason is set in stark competition with faith, because it’s set against that which is held most dear, it’s rejected. “Human reason” becomes an enemy; it is the theoretical name for the tangible political and social ostracism that is externally enforced upon (and unknowingly internally perpetuated within) modern evangelical Christianity. If you are a more conservative Christian, the scales are already tipped in the first exhibit’s ability to draw up those feelings (however slight) of victimization from which the rest of the museum is prepared to vindicate you.

The question, loaded as such, plays on a common human response. Victimization makes us all the more prepared, if not eager, to denounce anything which bears the oppressor’s name. Now, if you think this too abstract, that most people wouldn’t reject it simply because it’s called “reason” since they aren’t familiar with that history, let me say two things. First, as a reminder, it is put in contrast and thereby competition with Scripture. Secondly, “human reason” is displayed as the creator and sustainer of evolutionary theory.

For the Creation museum, there is no third way. You are either the righteous victim (who holds fast to Scripture) or the godless oppressor (who counts it as straw). And if we know ourselves well enough, we might be able to acknowledge that we love being the victim. The problem with the museum isn’t that it knows this and is exploiting it, but that it is, in itself, the unwitting manifestation and legitimization of it.

The first exhibit reveals and encapsulates the self-assertion of a faith community that it is not irrelevant, that it will not abide victimization (even while harnessing it to spur on the troops), that it too can legitimately speak in the public sphere . . . as is made evident by that shiny facade that just screams “validity.”

{ notes on "Peeping Tom" (1960) }

2009-01-08T00:56:00.009+01:00

Here are some scattered notes from a presentation on the film "Peeping Tom" (1960). I strongly recommend it! (Note: the headings in parenthesis were sections for which my partner was responsible.)

Opening Film Sequence

Opening eye:
At its most basic, the eye alerts us to the fact that this is a movie about looking. But we need consider that it is an eye that opens upon us: we have come to the screen to watch, but the first sequence places us as the object of the gaze. A connection is thus made between being watched and watching: between being the passive object trapped in a powerful, intense gaze and being the subject who actively gazes, trying to hold others. We are also curious to know what this eye is looking at: us, or something in the world of the film?

This simple imagery reveals three things: (1) our discomfort at being held in the unrelenting eyes of another, (2) the desire to assume the knowing gaze as our own, and (3) the collapsing of the objects of the gaze (the audience and the events in the film become one identity). But we are given no context within the film to make sense of who’s eye it was, where it was looking from, or what it was looking at. Instead we are left to make sense of that opening shot with the next, non-sequitur sequence with the 16mm camera.

Camera:
The eye is replaced by a 16mm camera hidden in someone’s jacket. Another collapsing of two objects into one in order to form a metaphor that illuminates aspects of both. The eye is a kind of camera, it selects what it gazes at, it focuses on certain aspects, and it “captures” images. And the camera is an eye: it is a seeing apparatus and it looks at the world in a certain way that bespeaks a larger context and influence (with the eye, how one’s world habituates a specific way of looking; with film, what the director wants to say about that shared world).

Also, the hiddenness of the camera seems different from how we usually think of the eyes: the eyes are the window to the soul, where we usually think we and others are most exposed and vulnerable. Indeed, much psychoanalytic philosophy has been dedicated to encountering the eyes or the gaze of the other. But here we have eyes, or an eye, that is trying to be concealed, that does not want to be seen or encountered by those it sees. We can think of this as symptomatic of the voyeuristic gaze, the “peeping tom” who only sees from positions where he, or she, cannot be seen in return.

Our camera then goes out of focus as the other moves toward us. Our “objective gaze” is thrown out of focus and we soon find ourselves looking through the lens of the voyeuristic eye. Our objective gaze has been subjected to or subsumed within the gaze of the voyeur. All the imagery from these first few scenes are here being pieced together in ways that call both the audience and the film makers into uncomfortable territory.

That the camera, and later the projector, are used by this sadistic voyeur signifies an indictment, or confession, of the way cinema gazes and how it tells us, its audience, to gaze. In this scene and the later one where we see our murderer watching his film, we find a kind of self-indicting confession of the feedback loop of cinematic gazes: the camera is controlled by a director who both represents and communicates a way of looking at the world and others. The director is both part of the audience who dictates the acceptable ways to look at the world as well as outside the audience telling them how to look. We, as the audience, do not therefore have an objective status in the theater; we are part of this feedback loop. These three gazes: the film’s gaze, the voyeur’s gaze, and our gaze are shown to be bound up with one another in this tripartite dialogical identity.

That Michael Powell was intending to indict cinema itself in the act of voyeurism is again hinted at as our perspective from inside the voyeur’s camera is no longer shot from the position where we had seen his camera - at his hip. Instead, we are now at eye-level. And then, as we move toward the prostitute we catch a peculiar shadow on the ground. And while we know that we looking from the perspective of the character’s camera, we see in that shadow a different identity. Where we should catch our own shadow, insofar as we and the voyeur are one in this sequence, we see instead the shadow of the film crew. Watching the rest of the film reveals an incredible attention to detail and scene composition, so to write this off as accidental would be to ignore a purposeful hint that Powell is providing us here. This sequence reveals that we, the voyeur, and the cinema cannot be separated as easily as we would have them, as easily as would allow us the comfort, objectivity, and innocence we like to suppose our way of looking at the world provides us. This desire for separation and division between ourselves and the voyeuristic gaze proves to be a recurring theme in the film in very significant ways.

The clicking:
It provides a recurring theme of inevitability. After this scene, clicking is only heard in reference to the timer in Mark’s darkroom as his film develops. Thus, as we watch this first scene, the ticking indicates that we have begun in on a story that has already be seen, already been filmed. We are simply waiting for the film to develop, for the image to become fixed, for the story to take its inevitable shape, a shape that we know must be tragic given its origins in this scene of murder. We see, even if not fully, the end in the beginning.

Private cinema:
After the murder, we find the murderer in his own cinema watching the film he just recorded. As we watch him watching, we are again asked to consider how our position as the audience is not so different from his. Moreover, watching his film we see that certain parts of the film have been omitted: the film has been cut and edited in an attempt to produce a specific desired result. So, as we have been prompted thus far to work within a tripartite dialogical identity, seeing the murderer watching his edited film asks us to question our own editing and arrangement of our perceptions.

There is a sense then, that it is not only the gaze that is being brought under examination, but what we do with that gaze, how we arrange the pieces to create a narrative that forms our view of the world, and thereby, forms our identity. That cinema plays a role in the formation of our identities, insofar as we are exposed to it, is hinted again at by the superimposition of the director’s name on the murderer’s projector. In his review and analysis of the film, Scott Ashlin recounts that “Powell went so far as to deny that Peeping Tom was a horror movie at all, claiming instead that it was nothing more nor less than a commentary on the exploitation and indeed sadism inherent in any form of human interaction that involves watching and being watched.”

(Shop Scene & Mark’s Home Movie)

After this scene, we see Mark at work in the film studio. He has arranged a date with an extra there, a date which turns out to be for murderous purposes. In that scene we see Mark trapping Vivian, the extra, in the bright lights of the film set, rendering her momentarily blind, confused, and slightly afraid. There is a metaphorical link at work here between the light of these studio lights and the light we saw on the prostitute’s face when she was killed and on young Mark’s face when he was filmed by his father. Indeed, because we do not yet know what is causing that light to appear on their faces, the connection is all the stronger. So, as soon as we see all these lights turning on in the studio, all directed at and blinding Vivian, we are aware that there is something wrong. We feel uneasy because we know the fear that was connected with those lights before.

They are lights that exhibit a kind of power: they are able to hold their object captive in the fear of the unknown of what lies beyond it. One is reminded here of Bentham's Panopticon, a prison without bars, that instead kept prisoners confined to their cell by fear. It achieved this by shining a bright light from a central guard tower, and telling the prisoners that if they walked out of their cells when a guard was on duty they would be shot. The prisoners however, never knew whether or not a guard was on duty because of the bright lights. They were thus held captive by their fear of constantly being under the real or imaginary eye of the guards. The lights of Bentham's Panopticon are precisely like the lights Mark uses here, they are lights that illuminate the object of vision while hiding the viewer.

These lights are therefore just like Mark’s camera in the beginning: it sees, but is not seen. The lights of the film studio are thereby embodiments of, either metaphorically or literally, the voyeuristic gaze. Also, Vivian, who is training to be an actress, is yet another embodiment of one who willingly gives themselves over to the voyeuristic gaze, like the prostitute in the beginning, and like the women being pornographically photographed. Contrast this with Helen who refuses to be gazed at in such a manner in the scenes we just saw. However, in the curiosity she embodies, Helen almost becomes a voyeur herself in the following scene.

Helen Reading

Here we see Helen take out and begin to read one of the books written by Mark’s father in which he had written about fear. We and Helen learned earlier that Mark was the prime subject of these studies, that Mark was continually in his Father’s gaze. He even makes the comment to her that he never knew a private moment in his entire childhood. Helen knows this when she takes this book from Mark’s shelf. She knows that within these books are clues to who Mark is. If we look back to the beginning scenes in the shop where Mark works part-time, we remember that the store owner hands the older gentleman the “views” in a bag labeled “Educational Books." We thus had a foreshadowing of the books on Mark’s shelf. For just as the pornography that the gentleman purchases are women nakedly exposed to the prying eye of the pornographer and the viewing public, so too is Mark, in his father’s books, nakedly exposed to the prying eye of his father and the reading public. Therefore, in beginning to read that book, Helen comes very close to becoming a “peeping tom” herself, looking without being seen, safely distanced from her object of inspection—Mark—by his physical absence and his static representation in the books of his father.

(Interrogation)

After the interrogation, Mark climbs to the rafters of the film studio to film more of the investigations, again assuming a position from which we can see but others cannot see him. When Mark arrives home he meets Helen’s blind mother, in front of whom he is visibly nervous. Mark and Helen then leave, with Helen leaving Mark’s camera behind in his mother’s room. The scenes that follow, though they are some of the most utopian scenes in the film, with Mark living in the present and truly enjoying Helen’s company, never quite escape from Mark’s disturbed subconscious. For almost the entirety of their date, we see a superimposed image of Mark’s dark room where the film is developing and we again hear the clicking of the timer, the same clicking we heard at the beginning with the prostitute. At the very moment in which we are so hopeful for Mark’s recovery, we are denied that hope by the inevitable development that that clicking implies. That their relationship is doomed is made even more tangible when, after they return to the house and Helen has kissed Mark and gone to bed, Mark pulls out his camera and kisses it in return. There is a lot that can be said about this scene, especially with a Freudian analysis, but I want to move on to what happens next when Mark returns to his dark room.

Mrs. Stevens

Blind Mrs. Stevens:
As Mark sits to watch his latest film, he is alerted to someone’s presence by a loud noise. He goes over and shines a stage light to where he heard the noise to reveal Mrs. Stevens calmly standing there against the wall. The usual power dynamics are altered though, and we see one reason why Mark was so afraid of her blindness: the light Mark now shines on blind Mrs. Stevens has no effect here. We see him cowering behind the instrument that he has so often used to assert domination over all his other victims, painfully aware that he is made completely powerless by her inability to see his means of domination.

And knowing that she cannot be blinded by his usual mechanics—the lights—he is stricken with fear that she sees, and therefore knows, everything. He is forced to recognize a vision that is more penetrating than his own. A vision more attuned with intuition, a kind of vision that needs no external mechanism to find truth, like Mark believes his camera to, and a vision that recognizes the often hidden nature of truth in things not visible, a recognition Mark does not, or cannot make. It is not so much that truth cannot be found in vision--hopefully we can acknowledge that since we’re trying to analyze a film--but rather that vision is sometimes distracting, blinding even. It is the over-privileging of the gaze, the ease of assuming a voyeuristic gaze, that is being critiqued here.

Living under rooms:
Walking away from the wall, Mrs. Stevens makes the comment that she visits Mark’s cinema every night, which she then clarifies by saying that “the blind always live in the rooms they live under.” I want to examine this quote in light of the film’s three main settings: the newsstand/pornography studio, Mark’s house, and the film studio.

First, in both the newsstand and Mark’s house, we have a downstairs area that is portrayed as a public space and an upstairs area that is private. At the store where Mark works part-time, all the pornographic photos on the walls immediately reveal that it is a somewhat sleazy establishment. And yet, one of its patrons is a young girl buying candy and the other is a seemingly respectable middle-class gentleman who is at least initially introduced as interested in buying two of London’s more respectable newspapers. We may therefore conclude, especially given the young girl’s presence, that going into this store does not necessarily make one guilty of being partial to pornography. And while it definitely does not make itself as socially acceptable as the downstairs of Mark’s house presented, it is still a place where one is able to turn a blind eye to its less seemly aspects. It is a location within the public sphere.

And this is precisely how we are introduced to the Stevens’ residence, the downstairs of Mark’s house. The first thing we see there is Helen’s 21st birthday cake, from which the camera zooms out to reveal a group singing happy birthday. One may note that here too, in this very public and respectable space, that Helen is given a large key as a joke. We may imply from Helen’s playful rebuke that the key likely represents access to Helen’s sexuality, a key to her chastity belt. Thus, like the pornography in the newsstand, the key represents a certain level of sexual expression that is more or less acceptable in the public sphere, given that the form which that expression takes here is much tamer due to its social location.

But now, returning to the shop, we see that the second floor is dedicated to the taking of pornographic pictures, a profession not at all socially acceptable, especially by English social standards in the 1960’s, though surely a profession for which there was a demand. Mark’s response to the store manager’s question about which magazines sell the most reveals that the dominant desire of their patrons is for magazines with, as he says, “girls on the front cover but no front covers on the girls.” The upstairs room of the store is the place where women are rendered “perfect” in their nudity and by the hiding of any abnormality, like Milly’s bruises and Lorraine’s scar. In this sense then, Mark’s darkroom in the upstairs of his house is a only a darker, more sadistic embodiment of that self-same act of production about the newsstand.

While the patrons of the newsstand want one kind of perfection in the images produced upstairs, Mark wants another, not all too dissimilar perfection in the images produced in his upstairs studio. His room, like the pornography studio, is hidden from the public, it is a place dedicated to the voyeuristic gaze and to capturing that gaze on film. And while the pornographic images deprive their objects of life by reducing them to still images whose only value is in their immediately accessible appearance, Mark's images, in the words of Mulvey, animate the image of death. That animation of the image of death is manifested in one of the most brilliant scenes of the film as Mark is showing blind Mrs. Stevens’ his latest film. As they watch, we see Vivian’s horrified face as a skull on the back of Mark’s jacket. Thus, the pornography studio looks for perfection in the gaze that robs its objects of life, while Mark looks for perfection in the gaze that gives life to the image of death. The two gazes are thereby shown to be two sides of one and the same coin, with Mark’s sadistic gaze merely being the darker side that is either at the root of voyeurism, or of voyeurism taken to its extreme, depending on how you interpret the relation of Mark’s darkroom to the pornography studio.

Moving now to the film studio in “Peeping Tom,” there exists an interesting relation between its function and the two-tiered structures we've just looked at. First of all, we can detect in the farcical nature of what is being filmed there a criticism of the current British film industry by Michael Powell and Leo Marks. The only thing of any merit in the film seems to be the attractive main actress who obviously cannot act. The film they are making there is thus nothing more than a socially acceptable voyeurism.

Mark however, uses the film studio for different means. When Vivian’s body is found, the extra whom Mark killed in the studio, it is found in a blue box. Note that the color blue has also been used throughout the film as the color of Helen’s clothes. In her clothing, Helen represents a very modest, socially acceptable image. So in having Vivian’s body fall into a blue trunk in his film, and in filming her body being discovered on the movie set in that same blue box, Mark presents us with a different picture of cinema than that constructed by Don Jarvis, the studio's owner who embodied for Powell everything wrong with British cinema. With Mark's camera, we get a cinema that sees its task as uncovering what is beneath the surface of the socially presentable. This is an image then, that says the film studio and cinema in general, should be a merging of the two worlds, of the two levels, of the public spaces and the private ones. In his films, Mark wants to reveal what is hidden, to make manifest the private upper rooms in public the downstairs rooms. The problem however, is that Mark thinks that all there is to be seen, what ultimately lies hidden up there, is only fear and death.

Returning now to Mrs. Steven’s comment that “the blind always live in the rooms they live under,” we can now understand her to be saying that she possess an insight into the truth of these hidden things, these private rooms, because she is free of a physical vision that is too often preoccupied with itself. Indeed, her disregard for the “social acceptability” associated with the downstairs space may be seen in her propensity to hard liquor, drinking Whiskey in about every scene. Instead, she lives predominately in those upper rooms that those with vision either try to ignore or go there only in perversion, in the broadest sense of that word. Mark’s fear of her is rooted here.

In her blindness, she sees that which Mark has been trying to capture on film: she sees the truth of what lies in the hidden places of one's self. And this is why he cannot stand her presence: he feels her blindness as an intense light of the same kind which he knew to be there when he would wake up screaming with his father at his bedside. And while she may believe there to be hope, seeing in him a possibility of redemption, all that Mark thinks exists in these upper rooms is death, whether that be in the form of pornography or in the fear captured his own films. And this is what Mark thinks she sees, and this is why he cannot stand to be in her gaze, which is to say, in her presence.

Lastly, Mark thinks his film of Vivian's death to be a failure because “the lights fade too soon." As we have seen, lights represent a power which is both able to hold its object and to expose the hidden nature of what is going on. (An interesting example that demonstrates the inability of light to provide even an adequate survey of the physical is when a police officer shines a light on Mark as he climbs down from the rafters and yet fails to see him.) But Mark has faith in these lights, they are his means of control, they are the embodiment for him of the controlling and revealing gaze, the voyeur’s gaze.

That the lights fade too soon thus represents his inability to fully control and reveal the other. Mrs. Stevens’ response that “the lights always fade too soon,” thus represents her acknowledgement that such complete control and insight is impossible, even in blindness with the access it provides her to those secret spaces. She knows the gaze will always fall short, that it will never be able to fully appropriate the other, that it will never be perfect. But the serenity with which Mrs. Stevens’ says this is an indication that she knows this is OK. She makes this comment to condole Mark, not to condemn him. But Mark can’t hear this; for him the gaze is a matter of science, his father has taught him that, and science needs perfect proofs and irrefutable evidence. And that’s what he has to find, or die trying.

{ still waiting for science }

2008-06-20T18:28:00.007+02:00

Below is a brief correspondence between myself and a friend. I have decided to post it in an attempt to clarify what I was attempting to communicate in the previous post.

Quoting Katy:

So I gave a quick look to your thoughts on CSI (I'm in between recording grades and getting my lecture notes together)-- very interesting! My initial question would be, how does this affect (if at all) the (often hostile) relationship between "hard" science, social sciences, and liberal arts-- which is admittedly an entirely other article? (I've tended to feel more of an antagonism between the latter two than anything else.) And what role does science play in determining the legitimacy of not only artistic modes of thought, but how we think about "the everyday"? (It seemed that you were getting at this, but I think I'm moving more in a criticism of scientism sort of direction, a la Neil Postman's Technopoly and such, and additionally into its monopolization of all realms of thinking, especially where global capitalism is a reality both fostered by encouraging of such a take-over).

Katy

*****

Reply:

Katy,

Thanks for the read and criticisms! Your antagonism is definitely justifiable, and its really what I first intended to write that peice with (frustrated, as I was, with the presumptive claim that we have to "wait on science"). But as I was writing, the piece just kind of started going another direction, and after about 2050 words, I really didn't feel like taking on the task of defining "art" and "science" to the degree I felt that it might take to really flesh out that antagonism.

You're suspicion of science "determining the legitimacy of not only artistic modes of thought, but how we think about 'the everyday'" is rightly raised, especially as the one character does not seem willing to assess the truth of ANY kind of claim until "science" shows up. There is an authority we tend to give to scientific claims that becomes totalitarian, it "has the last word."

On the other hand, one thing that was kind of an undercurrent in my post was that science's "last word" is sometimes artificial (represented in the show by the two characters using the label "mob," and thus were not entirely holding out for whatever science may provide) and/or misplaced (seeing that the conversation was about motive, how would science affirm that the act was racially motivated?).

There is also the curious fact that their and our "waiting for science" is answered in the end only by Greg's "art." Of the two ways to read this, I chose to take to it that "art" is often all we can come by, and that that's sufficient, and actually a better understanding of what science, in itself, is. So, by that reading, "art" incorperates "science." The other reading would be that Greg's "art" is subsumed under the label "science," such that science is the broader, more encompassing category.

The dilemma is that "art" has the final word on a show that presents itself as all about science and its sovereignty. But is there really a dilemma? I mean, CSI is a "show" after all, and as such, is an art-form itself. What the writers, producers, and actors do is art, not science.

I am not saying that the other reading is unfounded, and the episode definitely holds that possibility and prompts such a discussion as this. But by my reading, the episode holds a strong possibility of a different, "counter-cultural," reading.

I know this hasn't fully answered your question, which is more of a cultural criticism than I was going for, though your questions and their answers are likely needed (because I think they're right) as a reason why my reading of CSI might matter. Thanks!

-Thomas

{ waiting for science }

2008-06-18T03:10:00.008+02:00

“We got to wait for the science, don’t we?”

This is a line from the popular TV sitcom, CSI. Here’s a bit more of the context:

WARRICK: You working that case where some mob beat up an Indian cab driver for hitting a kid?
SARA: Cabbie didn't actually hit the kid. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
WARRICK: You think it was racially motivated?
SARA: Yeah, I do. White mob, white kid, dark-skinned cabbie -- I don't like the math.
WARRICK: Yeah. We got to wait for the science, don't we?
SARA: I'm trying.
WARRICK: That's the job. Good luck.

The “white mob” was a group of burly white bikers who, after witnessing the “dark-skinned cabbie” run-over the “white kid,” proceeded to violently pummel (and subsequently kill) the cabbie, whom, they thought, was trying to get back in his car to flee the scene. After 30 minutes of pseudo-psychology and flawless causal connections, we learn that the “white kid” had already been fatally stabbed by another character (his step-father) and had stumbled out into the street half-dazed and half-dead. The “dark-skinned cabbie” was unfortunately “at the wrong place at the wrong time,” and had not noticed the kid fall exhausted in the middle of the road. Finally, what the “white mob” perceived as an attempted escape turned out to be the cab driver’s attempt to radio in the accident on his dashboard walkie.

****

Now, the “science” that Sara must wait for is what the detectives on the show need in order to prove a definitive connection between the brutal beating (and death) of the cab driver and the “dirty dozen” - that is, the “white mob.” This “science” is eventually provided by DNA, as is par for the course (except in reality where no “dark-skinned cabbie’s” family would ever be able to afford, nor would many courts provide, the type of legal litigation necessary to get such evidence in the court), as one character on the show, by way of what he calls “art,” displays a board matching DNA found on the victim to that of 6 members of the mob:

GREG: First, I processed Mr. Khandelwahl's (the "dark-skinned cabbie") clothing. Then I compared the DNA I lifted from said clothing to the DNA from the dirty dozen.
(GREG indicates the board covered with a sheet.)
GRISSOM: All I see is a sheet.
GREG: But what I do is art. And now, I'm ready to unveil it. Welcome to the new and improved match game.

This pair of exchanges seems to prompt two related sets of questions.

First, what does Sarah’s invocation of “math” reveal?

Second, in what ways need we “wait on science”? What might constitute such waiting and is such “waiting” typical of our experience?

Thirdly, is there a boundary that is transgressed here between “science” and “art,” seeing that it is Greg’s “art” that provides the “science” Sara has been trying to wait for? What is the connection between the two that would justify "art" as providing an answer for "science"?

And finally, what does all this say about the world of CSI, and thus, of our world? (CSI is not written, directed, produced, or acted out in a vacuum. Its ideas must come from people who live with us and the show itself must be intelligible to its audience. The world of CSI need not be an accurate representation of our world (though I think this is what it attempts to approximate) to shed light on our life together.)

****

In this episode, it seems that Sara has to “wait on science” to confirm her suspicion that the crime was racially motivated. That suspicion is based on, what she calls, “math” - the sum of relevant factors that make up the discernible equation. As noted before, those factors are “white mob” (the concept of, and hence, definition of a “mob" is a theme that gets developed throughout the episode), “white kid” (or victim - though this latter word is avoided as to not draw premature conclusions and thus limit the factor - although this doesn’t seem a concern in the labeling of the “mob”), and “dark-skinned cabbie.”

But unlike math, this equation is dependent on its context to make it troubling, and true. The equation, in itself, need not trouble Sara. However, her choice of predicates points to a context where the equation is troubling, a context where racial tensions matter.

I guess we can call this math; it seems such an expression is fairly colloquial. We say, “this doesn’t add up” or “the situations has gotten exponentially worse.” The implications of referring to this particular situation mathematically, however, are revealing. First, it assumes (or recognizes) a world where these factors matter and are relevant to each other (for example, it would not make any sense to us if Sara had replaced race with height measurements and was troubled).

That Sara describes the situation as math and that her coworker, Warrick, describes her job as “waiting for science,” also reveals that those disciplines are what Sara (and presumably the others on the show) uses to make sense of the world. "Math" and "science" are taken as the relevant signs, the relevant points that make up a specific picture of reality.

Now, when we say of that something “doesn’t add up,” we mean that, given the factors we think to be relevant and their relative relationships (i.e. causal), we do not know how to make sense of it, how to describe it, to communicate it. To “not like the math,” then, could either mean to not like the conclusion (that the crime was racially motivated) or, by my reading, it is to not like what makes up the world where these factors hold. To “not like the math” is to not like the world where such a conclusion makes sense. Sarah has already admitted that she thinks the crime was racially motivated, she need not vaguely allude to such a belief here after just having confessed it openly.

What then do we make of Warrick’s response that Sara (and himself) has to “wait on science”? I want to set aside the possibility that this is merely bad writing, such that Warrick means the science will determine the mob’s guilt or innocence - which is not being discussed here. The guilt is already implied (if not assumed) in the designation “mob.” I will digress briefly to defend this.

Later in this episode, a character named Grissom states: “Emerson once said ‘The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.’ The beast is up for murder.” And later: “The mob mentality ... relieves individuals from having to distinguish between right and wrong.”

The word “mob” is thus consistently used in a decidedly negative sense. However, in Grissom’s grip, Emerson’s “beast” looses almost all its teeth, being reduced here to a vicious, mindless organism - rather than Emerson’s understanding of a creature that has no (need of) a guiding morality, nor depth nor truth which it owes to itself to pursue, discover, and abide by.

The later commentary Grissom provides (that the “mob mentality relieves individuals from having to distinguish between right and wrong”) restores a bit more of Emerson’s bite, though, still being set in the context of Grissom’s earlier comment, no one but the “dirty dozen” stand accused of such “beastliness.” The episode’s title “Blood Lust” also gives a hint into how we are to interpret “mob.”

In sum, the designation “mob” seems to imply a group whose members have amalgamated themselves into a “beast” - understood here as an organism that does not think (at all), but obeys only its own passions, that is, it’s “blood lust," its irrational and overwhelming desire to destroy life.

This said, Warrick’s choice of designation (“some mob”) reveals that the accused already stand condemned in his eyes. Moreover, the discussion between Sara and Warrick here is about motive, not guilt (“You think it was racially motivated?”).

Also revealing is Sara’s response to Warrick’s question about waiting. Is it because she recognizes that Warrick’s question is more of a statement (“We got to wait for the science,” such that the question at the end is more of a recognition of a state of affairs than a query into them) that Sara need not respond with an affirmation or denial, but can simply respond “I’m trying”? Both characters, it seems, view “waiting for science” as a somewhat lamentable, because difficult, situation.

What, then, does it mean to “wait for science”?

It seems here that Warrick’s statement about “waiting for science” invokes a sense of waiting for reality to confirm or disconfirm one's suspicions. It is waiting for whatever you take as reliable evidence about the world around you to come into contact, into communication, with your beliefs about the world.

"Waiting for science" is not skepticism, per se. We cannot avoid making claims about the world, we have accepted a certain picture, good or bad, of the world (our“math”); without which life together would be impossible. This "waiting" therefore, is a waiting for confirmation: is this math right? do I have the picture right? can I “go on” with this formula and its consequences?

Warrick’s response (to Sara’s “I’m trying”) that “that’s the job” is expandable, then, to “that’s life.” Life is about checking our “math” - our conception of how the world works - against tests and trials, against evidence.

The difficulty then, the difficulty that CSI avoids, is knowing what tests are reliable. In CSI and similar detective stories, there is always found evidence, always right and well-performed tests, and (almost) always bad guys (and girls) caught. The dots always connect in the end.

But that’s what shows do, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end - conflict and resolution. But in life, these things are (typically) only discernible in retrospect. We often do not know if our “science” is right, what “tests” matter, what should and should not alter our “math.” That is the difficulty of life, of living; we, like Sara, are left “trying.” And that is why we need to temper Warrick’s notion of “science” with something similar to Greg’s notion of “art.”

Near the end of the show comes the second exchange, wherein Greg states: "But what I do is art. And now, I'm ready to unveil it." At which point he turns and removes the sheet to show a board with the photos of the mob members and the cabbie's clothes, matching the DNA found on the clothes to the mob members those DNA samples match.

Why is this “art”? Though the board is a visual depiction and connection of the evidence, it seems no more “art” than a graphed asymptote. Greg seems to be simply presenting the “science” Sara and Warrick had been waiting on. So why “art”? Is Greg just overly pleased with his cut and paste techniques?

I want to suggest that Greg (and we as well) may consider his work "art” because it manifests a certain (re)presentation and (re)construction (as evidenced by the flashbacks spliced into Greg’s explanation) of reality.

That it is “DNA evidence” gives it a certain finality and certitude for most TV viewers (a finality and certitude they expect), though, by my understanding, the evidence Greg would have been able to pull would not have been that definitive at all. Even at the end of the presentation, Greg admits that he only has evidence for half the men convicted. There is still room for interpretation, still suspicions, still space to bring our math into question.

Art (re)presents and organizes the world in specific and purposeful ways, much like Greg's board) in order to communicate something about how we are to see our world, whether that be through Romanticism’s beauty or Post-modernism’s cultural critique. It asks us to question our own “math,” our own organization and conception of the world. It asks us to question the “math” presented in the art itself. It does not have as definitive a voice as science, nor should it claim to have such. (How definitive the voice of science is and how much weight we are to give to it is another question. Here I am merely intending to juxtapose the two, to demonstrate how they speak differently.)

It need be said that Greg's "art" is still a form of, or similar in purpose to, science. It speaks with the definitive voice the show needs to cadence. And, I think, the line between the two in our own world can be similarly blurry, possibly even more so. It may be that what while what passes for "art" on CSI is more "science," what is considered "science" in our world is more "art" than we usually (and comfortably) admit.

Maybe as we wait for whatever-may-end-up-constituting "science" to confirm or disconfirm our math, we should be looking to (as well as creating) art. Maybe waiting for science isn’t the job here so much as it is the inevitability, where we don’t yet know what to rightly call science. Maybe we need the humility to recognize of our world more as art. Maybe the best we can do is art. Maybe that’s what we’re called to do.

{ the ephemeral & the catastropic }

2008-06-12T19:29:00.011+02:00

I woke up this morning on the couch of my friend's apartment to the sounds of Midlake's "Bandits," off their album The Trials Of Van Occupanther. And though I've heard the song several times before, it sounded so incredibly beautiful and...perfect this time. Despite my physical discomfort (see below), and the inconvenience of being awoken at 7 a.m., the song could not have sounded more amazing, more perfectly composed. I don't know if it was my own early morning stupor or a dream's residue that made that music seem so sonically serendipitous.

But the physical reflex that sent my hand lunging for the snooze button cut short any waking and sustained enjoyment I might have had, and, just like waking from a dream, the experience was soon relegated to the fickle archives of memory. And just like most dreams, even that vivid and profound experience slowly slipped into ephemerality.

Ephemeral. How perfect!

See, the reason I was on the couch and not in the bed that had been set aside for me was because the apartment had been without air conditioning for the past few days, and the living room was the only room with a fan. So I decided to set up camp there for the night. Six hours later, there I lay, early morning, my throat was sore and hot (as it had been to some degree for the past few days for some unexplained - because uninvestigated - reason), my body had that sticky-sweaty feel, and despite dropping temperatures and a ceiling fan, the room was still about 85 degrees. Those factors combined created, fairly accurately, the experience of having a fever. I say all this because of ephemeral's etymology. It's first documented use was in 1398 as a medical term denoting a fever lasting only a day. How fitting then, that my ephemeral experience was two-fold in such an etymologically accurate manner!

But I think the etymological roots of ephemeral still linger in our usage today, even if only existentially coincidental. For it seems that ephemeral experiences, such as my musical morning awakening, remain in our memory much like those memories forged during periods of serious illness, such as, especially in early medicine, a fever. When one returns to those experiences afterwards, there is a certain sense in which we remember them only as interruptions, and as such, the more temporal distance that grows between our current self and that memory, the more difficult it is to definitively conclude that that experience wasn't simply a dream, or something seen in a movie, or a childhood fantasy.

This might be different if we used "ephemeral" to describe events that, even though fleeting, were substantial and consequential. However, this is not our ordinary use of the word. What is ephemeral is usually taken to be fleeting because it is insubstantial, because it is not largely important. One might say that, in one sense, "catastrophic" is the opposite of ephemeral, for though both denote a event or thing that is only brief and momentary, the former has weight, has consequences.

If the grass of the field is ephemeral, the lightening that splits the oak is catastrophic. And when we look back at the field, it is easy to remember the lightening and to see its effects. We might have once built a swing from one of its limbs that was rendered useless when the tree was struck. Catastrophic events change our lives, they "overturn" (Gk. katastrephein) the familiar. But looking back at the field, at the grass, we may have vague memories of greener patches, but for the most part, whatever changes may have occurred need not effect the large scheme of things, need not effect our lives.

What then of a God who clothes this grass? Of a God who feeds the sparrow? Of a God who counts hairs? When the beauty of the fleeting, the ephemeral, is eternally sustained in the heart of God? When everything is held in the life of God? When dreams are eternally sustained and breathed and loved? When the ephemeral is catastrophic?

{ the shadow of casualty }

2008-06-08T18:32:00.007+02:00

Casualty

Pronunciation: \ˈka-zhəl-tē, ˈkazh-wəl-, ˈka-zhə-wəl-\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural ca·su·al·ties
Date: 15th century

1 archaic : chance, fortune
2: serious or fatal accident : disaster
3 a: a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, or capture or through being missing in action b: a person or thing injured, lost, or destroyed

****

How has this word - casualty - lost its shadow? - that evidence at our feet that what looms above has mass, has density, has reality. That shadow that swallows our own as whatever-it-is passes overhead. Maybe this is one reason why Plato's "forms" fell out of favor? Those looming perfects in which everything participated had no shadow, they never actually participated in the world. We could never stand beside them and judge our height against theirs by comparing the length of our shadows in the evening. They were said to somehow loom above us, but they never touched us, never did our shadows meet. (The mystery of the Incarnation.)

But "casualty," how can casualty not have a shadow? It's reality, its weight, its shadow is attested by every grieving mother, every nameless grave, every obituary. The word carries with it the sense of "victim," and often of death, of tragedy. So maybe the shadow is still there, maybe the word does cast a shadow. Maybe it's just that we have let our eyes adjust to the darkness. It's not an etymological mistake that the root of the word is "casual." And as our language has gently modified "casual" from a sense of chance to a sense of nonchalance or unconcern ("casual sex"), so too has "casualty" lost its vitality, its depth, its shadow, or rather, we have diluted our perception of it.

Casualties are those lost by accident, victims of what is done casually. What, then, separates those lost in war and those who have casual sex - can we call them both "casualties"? Do we? Or, what of those who suffer because "casually" going about our own lives leads to their suffering - are they "casualties"? Or, maybe more revealing, what does it mean that ordinary, every-day attire, and sex with strangers both take on the same predicate? And from which sense of the word, if we are using them in two different senses at all, do we draw from when we say "casualty"?

How we use our words reveals our common life together. That we can communicate and understand one another reveals a common understanding, a communal acceptance of definitions, definitions that are always changing, but never arbitrarily. When we use one and the same word for Friday business attire and lives shattered by bullets and bombshells, it reveals either our disgust for the ordinary or an acceptance of the unacceptable, of the atrocious. Either the ordinary has become hideous, or the hideous has become ordinary. And, as the ordinary is the acceptable, I fear that it is the latter. I fear that our eyes and our tongues have learned all too well how to see and speak in and with darkness. We have, in a very frightening sense, become acclimated to our disorders, to our brokenness. Our language gives us away.

****

I have two friends who are married to each other, and are going through a very difficult time in that marriage. The difficulty, or difficulties, are not big, hot-topic issues like adultery or abuse. Rather, it's the small, ordinary things. It's those continual mistakes that have become par for the course. It is all the accidents that have come to constitute a character. Namely, the wife has become a casualty in the marriage, a victim to casualties - those ignorant and negligent acts of the husband. Now, though a casualty is a victim, the word seems to carry a sense that the pain or death inflicted was unintentional, it "just happened," it could not have been avoided. So, when I say she is a "casualty" I am not implying that she suffers any kind of physical or verbal abuse, I am merely saying that she suffers what could be understood as "just the way things are."

But there is the problem. She could be a casualty, I might be able to use that word. Can I? Can we? Do we? What do we say when...? That all depends, I guess, on what we take as casual, on what we understand to be more than casual, more than accidental. The moral problem begins with the words with which the moral problem is posed. Who and what are true casualties? What do we mean by casual?

I am not calling for a singular, all-encompassing definition, but for an examination of how we already use the word. Then, I hope, will we begin to see the shadow cast by "casualty." Then (and only then?) will the word again carry weight, density. Then will we understand the state we are in. My hope is that we will again be able to feel the chill when our own existence becomes entangled, and swallowed, in the shadow such a word does cast.

{ beneath the depths above us }

2008-06-06T14:33:00.013+02:00

Today sits outside my window, waiting, slightly slouching beneath the weight of the humidity gradually setting in. The sunlight is muted, as it tends to be these early summer mornings when the earth is delivering fresh libations of dew and vapor. The alter, itself; the offering, it's life-blood. How simple that act of praise, written as it is into the grain of the world. But what an act of faith! The earth gives back to the sky the very gift which gives it life. The greenery, in joy, in fruition, gives it's very life--self-sacraficially--to the sky from whence that life first fell. There is no expectancy or certainty, on the earth's part, that that life will return. It gives wholly of itself, it relinquishes itself. In silence.

We call it the "water cycle" and bring it into our classrooms, containing it with diagrams on posters and textbooks. We domesticate it. Demystify it. But predictability need not supplant surprise or wonder - or emulation. But cycles are circles - and we all know there is no point where a circle begins, so how could we even begin to enter into a circle, this cycle of praise and blessing. Each point along the curve is only what must have been or what must be. Our lives, we tell ourselves, are different, need be different. Life, we tell ourselves, is about choice, free will, autonomy, space.

What a sad, sad lie.
What an easy, easy lie.
What a lonely, lonely lie

. . . when every touch, every word can move us to tears, to anger, to joy. Our bodies, our lives, our "selves" are always a thousand leagues beneath the beautiful and frightening ocean surface, touched, pressed, always. Our stars do not shine pure and straight but are refracted a thousand times by the depths above us, by those manifold lives around us that make up any singular life. Yes, we move, we walk, we choose to turn, but beneath the wieght of the depths above us, and within the movement of currents around us.

Currents, cycles, circles. Moving, turning, re-turning.

We are afraid to admit we are moved by currents, that we are always already within cycles. That we are moved, pressed, and without complete control. We are so afraid we will not be able breathe down here, underwater, in this the thickest of days when the humidity materializes on every flesh. When our bodies become the world's altar, when we are wrapped up with and within those summer day libations. When we are dragged into a cycle, a circle, a current of praise that ever presses and lifts us. When knowledge gives way to acknowledgment. When we feel the weight beneath the depths above us.