The Golden Ass

Pentacostal emotional excesses remind me of the catharsis of ancient Greek theater. Or perhaps an ancient Jewish funeral lament. It's actually the same thing happening. All the mourning and weeping...the excessive bodily expression...“Woman, why are you weeping?," says the already resurrected Jesus.

But, I'm learning that, like everything else, I've been looking at this all wrong. That's part of why, last week, I had the sense that I needed to return here again.

Last week I thought of all the excesses of dancing, crying, clapping, waving, and screaming as a kind of inverted revelation of the truth of how our person is tied to our body when we proclaim that we are not bodies but spirits. When we proclaim that our person is not interwoven with our body but, instead, the opposite. When we imagine ourselves as disembodied spirits, then our body finds a way to make itself known somehow. There is probably some truth to this.

This week, the sermon is on 1 Corinthians 4: 18. "...because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal."

While conflictedly self-aware of my own judgmental attitude, I thought to myself, "Oh Lord, here we go. More disembodied dualism." Then, however, the preacher for me unexpectedly took that verse to be about how our affliction is temporary but God has promised blessing. He began speaking explicitly to a body of people who can't pay their bills, whose afflictions include getting their electricity shut off and actual or potential eviction. He said, "We had to cry and mourn our way through 2019, but you know what..."

No wonder all the weeping and tears!

I find this disconnect between body and spirit, this identification with disembodiment, to be disagreeable. Last week, my lesson was how my realization of my outsidedness to that disembodiment is itself precisely a needed lesson in acceptance and belonging in the midst of an exiled body of people living among a social body to which I more easily belong. I don't have those same economic struggles. (see lik here for my reflection on my lesson at that time)

Today I was struggling particularly hard during what only incidentally turned out to be the 20 minutes of loud, cathartic lament that is natural in a Pentecostal setting but was shocking to my system. While they purposefully set aside space for all that excessive emotional dancing and weeping and calling out, I was struggling with judgement and a sense of alienation. This was partially simply because I had a headache, and it was really loud. But still.

Then the pastor made a pretty explicit connection between, on the one hand, all that weeping and, on the other, serious struggles that are generally foreign to me. Suddenly it hit me:

The bodily excesses aren't a revelation of the truth of our personhood being connected to our bodies. At least not primarily. The trauma of body / spirit dualism or detachment from our bodies to which one might attach doctrinally actually becomes a practiced way of coping with or reconciling to the exile of drowning in the flooding, fundamental chaos of eviction or electrical disconnection that gets expressed in abundant tears and cries of lament and loss. It's not attachment to belief. It's reconciliation with trauma.

33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. 34 He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” 35 Jesus began to weep. - John 20

The part of the sermon where he talked about not fighting or slapping someone out of anger in response to being hurt or to avoid being hurt in the first place at first struck me as random and disconnected to what else he was saying. He at least didn't explain the connection. I suspect I'm the only one in the room who needed an explanation.

Now I realize he's talking about coping with trauma by turning to the God of love and peace rather than by enacting the way of "the flesh." I remember a well off African American friend recently talking about how her sister got jumped in school by a group of fellow African Americans. For her, a central part of the story was that they were "a different class of people." Now I get that they were coping with alienation and loss "in the flesh."

This means that last week's lesson is the same as this week's. My judgement of and alienation from beliefs I don't agree with or even consider to be dangerous aren't really even about the doctrines or beliefs. They're actually about very human and divine questions of exile and belonging, alienation and acceptance, scarcity and provision. They're more primarily about distance and closeness, inhumanity and dignity, contempt and love.

I've been looking at everything all wrong.

The last words of the song of the service were: "May the Spirit be beside you / To remind you that you're a child of the King."

Interestingly and appropriately to my lesson today, then, the above picture is of one of the paintings in the men's bathroom. (Be sure and read the quote)