The Golden Ass

In group discussion on Michael Gonzalez’s sermon on Matt 23: 1-12, he noted that, in election season, he sees a lot of pastors saying things like, “God is sovereign and in control.” They are trying to be helpful, but that can often serve to avoid entering into the struggle of shared life together (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls and invites - in other words, ELECTS - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another and who share life together in himself. We are called and “elected” into a shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared enduring, as we enact this shared life together, as we live for one another as the covenant people who are thus committed to each other in the life-blood of Christ’s Way.

What do we tend to imagine “The Elect” the way they are depicted in this photo? Do we notice that it depicts our predominant reign of controlled segregation rather than the shared life into which God “calls” and invites us, or into which we are “elected”?

Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23. I was pierced as Michael shared and clarified this, because I was confronted with the realization of a fear I had not previously known or noticed was present in my soul or in my heart. Or perhaps I had simply not named and embraced it? I fear that, if I expose and confront disharmonious and unjust relationships in our communities the way Jesus does here in Matthew 23, I would, with my own words, winnow out those who, if not for my words, might otherwise be willing to join in the shared life, shared struggle, and shared endurance. This is of course nonsense, because I’m not the one doing the “electing.” And, this is Good News from God.

I also fear my own desire to use Matthew 23 to condemn others as though I am myself at a distance from its message. There is a whole other story here about my confrontation with my belief “in my bones” that I don’t have a voice to speak on this, and that I thus must by necessity compulsively reach out and grasp for that voice. But that’s not what this series is about. Also, at some point, I still at root tend to fear the truth of Matthew 23 itself.

As I prayerfully named and owned, embraced and faced these fears, I suddenly saw that, my being born into a desire for entering into the shared life and struggle involved and required my own coming to terms with precisely the kinds of words from Jesus that he speaks or has spoken to me in Matt. 23. In this relational engagement with Jesus, I am the Pharisee (and not because I pit works against and over grace, which pretty obviously has little to nothing to do with this passage). So, my response to Jesus’ invitation to shared life involved confession and lament, along with repentance.

“And, the greater among you shall be your servant. And whoever will exalt himself will be humbled, and whoever will humble himself will be exalted. But alas for you, scribes and Pharisees…” – Matthew 23: 11-13

So, if I consider my place in relationship between Matthew 23 and my white friends more as my entering into the narrative voiced by Jesus, as our placing ourselves inside the story, and less as my speaking at and criticizing my white friends for not entering, then what? What changes? And how do we go about engaging the text, the story, particularly during this hotly contested and contentious “election” week? Does Matthew 23 become ours? Can we own it? What might that look like? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe?

This week, I read Capitalism and Gay Identity (see LINK, HERE if you're interested in reading the whole thing), by John D'Emilio (*pictured here on your left).

A basic summary:

In the face of homophobia and systematic oppression, and in a context in which more gays and lesbians were left to discover and explore their sexual desires in isolation and invisibility, myths were constructed to to help narrate their identity and history as part of a quest for liberation. D'Emilio refers to the primary one as the "myth of the 'eternal homosexual', in which "it was empowering to assert that 'we are everywhere.'" Partly as an effort to "demystify" gay history and identity, this essay purposefully challenges that and, instead, tells the alternative story that, in comparison to the partnership in the family unit of Puritan New England that was necessary for survival, the individual autonomy afforded by the wage labor of the growing and spreading of capitalist system of the mid 19th century made possible a growing subculture of gay and lesbian life (especially) in the big cities, where people with homosexual desires could communally support one another in ways that the older family unit had supported others, both economically and emotionally (particularly in more rural areas). (Don't miss here the tension between rural and urban life that lives on today in our political antagonisms)

What Puritans referred to as "unnatural desires" are documented, their incidences appear to be rare and, not to mention, to render impossible their way of life, literally their only means for survival. There did seem to be a difference between those who "explored" "unnatural desires" and then moved away from it when rebuked by religious leadership, as compared to those who "persisted" in it. But, overall, D'Emilio indicates that, not only did the growth of capitalism increase the ACTUAL numbers of gay people, it also made gay IDENTITY a thing in the first place, by making possible the formation of communities and clubs where such an identity could and did make sense. In any case, my main takeaway here is that a gay man is telling us that there was no such thing as an individual "identifying as" "gay" prior to the growth and reign of our capitalism. And, not only that, but D'Emilio is telling us this AS PART OF HIS QUEST FOR LIBERATION. He notes that capitalism served as a two-sided coin for gays and lesbians. Though the increased visibility and voice granted to "homosexuals" by capitalism resulted in purposeful and larger efforts to silence and oppress them (such as "urban vice squads that invaded private homes" and police "sweeps of gay male bars"), capitalism was also the very thing that made their way of life possible. The YMCA that served as a site for "socialized" child rearing or fellowship was also a place where gay men met one another.

"Claims made by gays and nongays that sexual orientation is fixed at an early age, that large numbers of visible gay men and lesbians in society, the media, and the schools will have no influence on the sexual identities of the young, are wrong. Capitalism has created the material conditions for homosexual desire to express itself as a central component of some individuals' lives; now, our political movements are changing consciousness, creating the ideological conditions that make it easier for people to make that choice."

D'Emilio explores that and how capitalism has a "contradictory" relationship to the family. It extracted "the material basis of the nuclear family by taking away the economic functions that cemented the ties between family members." The goods and services we need for survival that were previously produced in the family were exported to a capitalism whose territory was steadily growing, thus wreaking the forces that kept men and women in the family. "On the other hand, the ideology of capitalist society has enshrined the family as the source of love, affection, and emotional security, the place where our need for stable, intimate human relationships is satisfied."

In other words:

"Materially, capitalism weakens the bonds that once kept families together so that their members experience a growing instability in the place they have come to expect happiness and emotional security. Thus, while capitalism has knocked the material foundations away from family life, lesbians, gay men, and heterosexual feminists have become the scapegoats for the social instability of the system."

D'Emilio thus points to the "socialized" institutions and organizations that become the sites of child rearing, education, production, labor, and fellowship in a capitalist system as signs, at one and the same time, of the instability of "traditional" family life in a capitalist system AND of OPPORTUNITIES for the BUILDING of emotional intimacy and communal economic support in an otherwise less stable capitalist system.

"Gay men and lesbians exist on social terrain beyond the boundaries of the heterosexual nuclear family. Our communities have formed in that social space. Our survival and liberation depend on our ability to defend and expand that terrain, not just for ourselves but for everyone. That means, in part, support for issues that broaden the opportunities for living outside traditional heterosexual family units: issues like the availability of abortion and the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, affirmative action for people of color and for women, publicly funded daycare and other essential social services, decent welfare payments, full employment, the rights of people - in other words, programs and issues that provide a material basis for personal autonomy."

D'Emilio is then explicit and pulls no punches: "To be sure, this argument confirms the worst fears and most rabid rhetoric of our political opponents." By "our" there, he's referring to gays and lesbians. The "fears" he's referring to are "that capitalism has led to the separation of sexuality from procreation," that "it's expression has increasingly entered the realm of choice," and the affirmation of "sexual expression as a form of play." "The rights of young people are especially critical. The acceptance of children as dependents, as belonging to parents, is so deeply ingrained that we can scarcely imagine what it would mean to treat them as autonomous human beings, particularly in the realm of expression and choice. Yet until that happens, gay liberation will remain out of reach."

"Lesbians and homosexuals most clearly embody the potential of this split [between sexual expression as being governed by reproductive imperatives as compared to entering the realm of choice]...Our movement may have been begun as the struggle of a 'minority,' but what we should now be trying to 'liberate' is an aspect of the personal lives of all people - sexual expression."

All too briefly and incompletely, I've found myself having a number of fairly strong reactions to this essay:

1. Apparently all progressives aren't Marxists. Such scapegoating by conservatives is: a. an ideological puff of wind, and b. a trauma response of the body in the face of a sensed threat to the survival of both their very bodies and of what they care about. As D'Emilio says it:

"On the one hand, capitalism continually weakens the material foundation of family life, making it possible for individuals to live outside the family, and for lesbians and gay male identity to develop. On the other, it needs to push men and women into families, at least long enough to reproduce the next generation of workers. The elevation of the family to ideological preeminence guarantees that capitalist society will reproduce not just children, but heterosexism and homophobia."

2. I confess that I SENSE in my body that same threat and fear. I want to affirm "sexual expression as a form of play, positive and life-enhancing." But, I don't want to do that at the expense of "nature." I am very wary of the modern urge to a biological foundationalism, but that is precisely because I want to affirm a teleological understanding of how the body functions.

3. I tended to dismiss the ideological rantings of my conservative friends against the progressives' relationship to the family as empty puffs of wind. This was partly because they misappropriate their anxiety as being towards "Marxism" (or whatever). Also partly because I tended to assume that God's command to "multiply" wasn't an imposition of controlling rule from above but a descriptor; humans aren't going anywhere unless they destroy themselves. But, this essay brings to a head real tensions. It's true that my ideologically minded conservative friend is mischaracterizing "the left" when he says they take abortion to be "an inherent good," because no one who goes to get an abortion really WANTS to do so, and nor do they throw a party afterwards. But, I can understand how that would come across to conservatives as nearly irrelevant if "liberation" means that the standard image of how social bonds are formed and emotional intimacy is developed is essentially an image of kids with no "natural" parents (which is different from "it takes a village"). Like, I really grieve that my nieces' Dad is dead. And, I don't view that as an illegitimated grief. I suspect that anyone whose parents have ever gotten a divorce can probably identify with this grief or concern (and I get that D'Emilo is critiquing the source of that grief).

4. My desire to affirm a "teleological understanding of how the body functions" is not absolute or totalizing. I ALSO want to affirm that we don't and can't know as much as we think we can if we simply and only characterize those who the Puritans noted to have "persisted" in their "unnatural desires" after public rebuke as "aberrant," or if we mock them as idiotically, pridefully, and selfishly having "chosen" the impossible. I don't want to pretend I know more than I do. Because I don't. I take biological foundationalism to be not only different from "natural law" but also dangerous. And, I take it to be not only dangerous but most predominantly undifferentiated from likely a confused image or understanding OF "natural law." In other words, when I see someone mocking LGTBQ+ people and echoing sentiments along the lines of "the body's biology at birth doesn't lie," I want to remind them that such a view of "biology" is actually not only quite new (relatively speaking, in our history) but was by necessity the rejection of the very teleology I want to affirm.

5. Though I like that D'Emilio "demystifies" "gay identity" by tying it to the contingencies of the history of our capitalism, I also like that he shows absolutely no interest in trying to explain away in any fundamental way the source and root of homosexual desires, or even of sexual desires in general. This is part of what I mean by #4.

5a. This essay - along with a newfound grace enough to be more honest with myself and others - brought to mind a particular memory of a "homosexual behavior" I engaged in when I was 4. I had almost completely forgotten about it. When we were "caught," I experienced brief shame and moved on. I did not "persist" in the exploration. It has not haunted me since. I would like to assume that's because I haven't had such desires since that time. After all, it wasn't even my idea (I want to tell myself). But, what if the powerful force of shame was what really locked that memory away into a relatively and inaccessibly dark vault of actual desire of some sort? I have to confess that this question struck me with some force as I read this essay. I don't experience those desires now in any meaningful or significant way, but I have had enough blind spots in my soul illuminated to know that this doesn't mean I know the answer to the question that so struck me.

6. Given the real tensions that come to a head in and because of this essay, and given the mysterious nature of their ultimate source, I feel the essay guides Christians into a place where the Lord's prayer itself can lead us to pray The Lord's Prayer specifically in the context of what this essay makes clear is a REAL CONFLICT between "gay identity" and "family values," between John D'Emilio and Jerry Falwell Jr (btw how is his way of handling this conflict working out for him?). Where this conflict LIVES IN OUR BODIES, we can embrace the truth of that conflict, confess it, and ask for God's healing and direction. Of course, this means the letting go of our "grasp" - to use a bodily metaphor - on ideological means and ends. It means we can let go of controlled outcomes. We can instead submit ourselves before a horizon whose end we can't fully see. That horizon is the veil of the Temple of Creation, the veil between what we can and can't know, see, hear, or touch.

7. Where capitalism renders extremely unstable the traditional family source of economic and emotional security, we can pray, "Give us this day the bread of the presence that cannot run out." We can pray the same for those we perceive as our ideological "enemies," btw (and what would acting on and submitting our bodies and actions to that prayer mean and look like!?). Where, in our real anxieties and fears, we have given our allegiance to a history of "urban vice squads" and "witch hunts" against "the gays" that carries on into the present, we can pray, "Forgive us our trespasses." Where we perceive those who set themselves up as "enemies" to have gone on the attack against what we - and and many Christians would say rightly - hold dear (with essays precisely like this one) in ways that (we sense) threaten and hurt us, we can pray, "As we forgive those who trespass against us."

Of course, this would mean entering into and submitting to a posture of vulnerability rather than compulsive attack from a posture of power - which is Jesus' third temptation in the wilderness, one of the ones we pray about in the Lord's Prayer! And, this would also mean tending to and caring about being in harmonious relationship in the first place with those in our lives who have experienced or do experience "homosexual desires" - rather than, under ideological pretense (or perhaps while covering over our own shame?), excluding and exiling them from our presence and our lives. Rather than making them disappear.

My best friend when I was four, the one whose idea it was - you might be wondering what ever came of him? As he grew up, he came into a difficult life of drug addiction. He ended up committing suicide. If I remember right, around the time we turned 30. And, a mutual friend who grew up across the street from him? He "came out of the closet" a few years ago or so. I have to wonder if the history and present of how the church has related to the LGTBQ+ community, in which all of us who "identify" as "straight" Christians are complicit, contributed to the way his life went and, especially, the way it ended. I also have to wonder if, now that he has disappeared, it's what we really want?

What might it look like for straight Christians to name, own, and confess our fears and anxieties about LGTBQ+ people and to thus confess and repent of harm done to them? Would that make a shared life together more possible and harmonious? What would it look like, and how might it be accomplished? Is that even what we really want?

As I work through the Gravity Leadership material, they keep asking me what or which imagine of God influences me in this way or that.

Well, it's becoming abundantly clear to me that I'm a functioning polytheist.

Not including ones I haven't figured out yet, I serve gods fashioned in the images of Judge Judy, Rage Against the Machine, the hot golem Woman (think Jewish mysticism rather than Lord of the Rings lol) in "Weird Science" (1985 film, Google it if you want lol), and Regis Philbin dotingly hosting "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire."

And, half the time, multiple of these are at work at the same time.

I am a confusing mess! LOL

Thank you Jesus and Gravity Leadership for helping me sort through this mess who is me! Haha

It was a little less than a year ago when I wrote the above. I am now working through the same stuff while this time "leading" a group of people through it myself. In my original writing - here - I expounded on how my false Judge Judy god had shaped and formed me to see Jesus wrongly and to (thus) misread Luke 17: 5-10 (as but one mere example). I then - here - clarified some of the contextual background of the passage and how I am just like the disciples in their pride's governing their relationship with their own version of my "Judge Judy" god(dess).

I would like now to explain a bit more of what I mean by and how I actually experience the polytheism by which I tend function when left to my own devices outside of trust in Jesus. We tend not to recognize these as divinities, because we tend to assign them to the realm of the secular. We also tend not to see them as divinities who govern us and our actions, because, when implicitly asking questions of what or who governs us and our actions, we tend to have our eyes set on the comparisons between right and wrong doctrinal beliefs and between right and wrong behaviors.

With the help N.T. Wright and of Psalms 135 and 115, I have come to view the "forces" that govern my identity and my actions as idols, however, because: 1. They are images which govern our reality or realities, 2. Those images are made "by human hands"; they are fashioned in our own image(s), 3. We make sacrifices to them, usually in blood, 4. They shape our way(s) of life, 5. Our allegiance to and trust in them renders us blind and deaf to their very existence, and 6. They are usually originally good and fruitful parts of the created order that have puffed themselves higher and beyond their well-ordered role into, instead, someone or something they really arn't, leading us into all sorts of violence and calamity, death and destruction.

That these are gods rather than secular forces means that I can't separate the political from the religious and the spiritual from the profane from one another as I had been trained to imagine and think. It also means that "everything is spiritual." It, in turn, means that we're always being disciped, and it's not always by Jesus. This requires discernment.

So, who are these gods or goddesses? What do they actually look like? How do we follow after them? And what sacrifices do we make to them? I will not be able to give those questions the full treatment they are owed here. What is intended here is a brief snapshot. Others have already written about all of them, likely far better than I. But alas, here is a breif snapshot and beginning of my articulating my discernment of my spiritual formation, my discipleship into a kingdom that's foreign to that of King Jesus. I serve gods fashioned in the images of Judge Judy, Rage Against the Machine, the hot golem Woman, and Regis Philbin from "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire"...

My Judge Judy god scares me, and I feel like I have to exhaust myself to appease her, no matter what sacrifices I make to her. I tend to be paralyzed in fear of her. Her dehumanizing screams tend to drown out my voice. By the same token, her demands tend to shape the image of reality and of my identity to which I aspire. She is thus closely associated with our rather pervasive and powerful gods of White Supremacy and Meritocracy. As Christians, and especially as Protestants, we tend to falsely fashion the "justice" of Yahweh in the image of something or someone like this god. This week, an African American friend of mine named Michael Gonzalez helped me - here - to articulate what this god can come out looking like at times.

My Machinist god makes me feel like a mere robot, like everything is predetermined to a managed outcome, and I'm just a cog in a wheel of a bigger machine where every molecule is meticulously controlled. My very personhood is inevitably sacrificed to him (because that's how he works), and I tend to respond with a seething, underlying rage. This god is not fashioned in the image of any human being but rather of a clock, or perhaps a Clockwork Universe. Or, for some, perhaps it is fashioned in the image of an emotionally distant authority figure who is "supposed" to be humanely caring but who, instead, views his own role as that of a cog in a machine of efficiently predictable and controlled outcomes to drive revenue and earn a living. For some, this god looks more like an inhuman, bureaucratic machine that stands in the way of and between genuine human relating among one another. Christians, and especially Protestants, and especially Calvinists, tend to fashion the God of the scriptures in the image of this false god. Many Christians also tend to mistake the secular categories of "socialism" or "communism" for this god whose images, actions, sacrifices, and way of life are all actually defined by Capitalism, both historically and now.

My Golem Woman god is crafted in the image of my own sense of drowning in utter, alienating darkness of social isolation (see Psalm 88; it's the best articulation I've ever seen of my sense of social isolation growing up as a kid). I tend to respond by either holding onto nostalgic memories of relational connections lost to the winds of time or by feverishly grasping with offerings of steam-powered words from the Delphic oracle of eternal, half-substantiated optimism that Kelly Lebrock will randomly appear at the door of my bedroom lol. (You may have heard that it doesn't work that way LOL). Some have articulated or named this goddess as Eros, or perhaps Aphrodite. She is a very powerful goddess, expecially (for example) on social media these days. She sells easily. Many of our sacrifices to this goddess are in the form of the blood of unborn children.

My Regis Philbin god keeps asking me if I want to be a millionaire with no cost or sacrifice to me or anyone else. He dresses up as Santa at Christmas time. Easy money and my chicks for free. He wants to give me whatever I want but smiles manipulatively so I forget that he doesn't actually care about me or want me to flourish in the fullness of my humanity. Said humanity is the real sacrifice to this god, but I tend to indulge in the fantasy that he does care, that winning the Powerball WOULD give me the esteemed image of myself that I really want. Or - overwhelmed with wariness of my fear of Judge Judy and tired of indulging my Rage Against The Machine - I tend to forget that I care one way or the other. This is the god of our "materialism," which some in our history have named Mammon.

Then, quite contrary to all of these, there's Jesus. If God is like Jesus, and in God there is no unChristlikeness at all, then how do you imagine that Jesus is unlike the gods or goddesses I named above?

"If the incarnation is the intersection of dirt and divinity, mortality and immortality, the divine life filling human existence, how did salvation get reduced to an immaterial, cognitive reality?" - Michael Gonzalez

His question was intended to invite reflection and discussion, which is wonderful. This is something I've thought about a lot, because "the intersection of dirt and divinity, mortality and immortality" is a reference to the creation story, where God's "breath" makes alive the "dirt" from which Adam is formed. If this is who we are, then why is our predominant image of salvation so much different? Whether I knew this was the question I was asking or not, I've sensed "in my bones" for over 20 years that something is "off." That set me on a quest, of sorts. I've become convinced that trauma is part of our answer to Michael's question.

A friend Joshua Brockway, half in jest, answered Michael's question with Descartes (self-consciously over-simplifying). I used to be super mad at Descartes...until I realized he was participating in collective trauma.

Speaking of our view of salvation, another friend named MariJean said the other day:

"I wanna figure out the collective trauma of evangelicalism because they are collectively horrible at empathy, with a few exceptions. I think that fundamental trauma is rooted in the doctrine of depravity."

Historically, total depravity (which colors our view of salvation) was articulated in the first place with the birth of our colonialism - and with it the beginnings of White Supremacy. Willie Jennings traces how, historically speaking, the very identity of "White" began to be formed in our imagination in the first place as imperial European colonialists encountered those of darker skin tones on faraway continents, with the intention of conquering and exploiting them. This became a collective baptism in a new, global bloodshed. Thus, total depravity was constructed with collective trauma ALREADY in the political and cultural background of the discourse in which said total depravity was articulated. As my friend Matt Tebbe says: "We don't just think our way into new ways of living. We live our way into new ways of thinking."

So, if I consider our way of life that disjoins divinity and dirt and our thinking from our embodied practices, if I consider our way of life that is symbolized in practices of said reduction of salvation to immaterial, cognitive reality - practices such as the Billy Graham-esque altar call or of the Catholic catechism into a way of life ordered to the salvation of the soul whose end is up in heaven - I can't just blame Descartes' thinking.

When we're talking about ergo cogito sum and totalizing theological systems that encompass everything with a view from and within the mind (supposedly), it could be said that what we're talking about is dissociation. Neurologically speaking, dissociation is a response to trauma, leading to compulsive responses that grope towards life or survival - loosely, then, toward "salvation" - that render a healthy relationship with our body basically impossible without, first, at least, dealing with the trauma.

Someone in Michael's thread mentioned Slaveholder Theology as a root cause of why "salvation get[s] reduced to an immaterial, cognitive reality." After all, slave masters implicitly perpetuated the story that, because all authority is from God, rebellion against said authority is a far greater danger to the slave than the White Supremacy to which he or she was bound. That's not just people thinking. It's actual trauma. And, it was neither the point of nor the reason why Paul told slaves to obey their masters and show them honor, no matter how they were treated.

Before Slaveholder Theology was the Reformation - when the previously referenced total depravity, as we generally understand it, was articulated. That was set in a larger, totalizing system of thought that encompassed everything. That's also not just someone thinking. That's the traumatic displacement from place and the violence against black flesh that Willie Jennings talks about that resulted from the colonialism that was the context of the Reformation. This colonial trauma was also in the middle of the traumatic breaking apart of the body of an empire through a series of massive religious wars. These together are precisely the collective trauma in which Descartes was participating, which was his context. Hell - Descartes is most famous for questioning what's real in the first place! Boom - trauma.

Willie Jennings narrates the colonial trauma upon Africa and her peoples as an unearthly "displacement" in which we come to practice the "thinking of peoples together with regard to race." This description of how race was articulated as a category in the first place, which I will expound on a bit more below, sounds strikingly similar to my previous description of our now predominant and taken-for-granted ways of thinking that train us into orienting ourselves in relation to totalizing theological systems. This displaced practice of identifying with our speculative view of all things from atop our Babylonian Tower on offer to us by our cognition is itself dissociation from the incarnate "intersection of dirt and divinity." Jennings also describes this as the "uncoupling of identities from specific places" and as being "pulled into a boundary-less reality."

And that "displacement" was on top of - both figuratively and historically - generations of traumatic bloodshed prior to any and all of that. And, I realize that in Slaveholder Theology, and in the Reformation theology born in the context of colonialism's traumatic displacement, those who came to designate themselves "white" weren't the ones bearing the traumatic events.

But no one witnesses or perpetuates violent trauma upon another without themselves being dehumanized. And, that's what trauma does. It makes us into different humans, a different humanity. Those inflicting trauma are dehumanized by it, as well. In some of the SAME WAYS as the one traumatized.

The laughter and mocking of Jesus occurs at the site of the same dissociation of the one traumatized. No human sees someone tortured and murdered and isn't moved to compassion and even action. To quote William Blake, we become what we behold. So, to see Jesus and to laugh and mock is to have become inhuman. The human one, the Son of Man, is the litmus test of our humanity.

This means that it's also difficult for the one inflicting the trauma to come to terms with it, just as it is for the one traumatized. No less difficult, even? Just as miraculous, for sure. To answer my friend MariJean's question, Jesus is who shows us why we are bad at empathy.

I think this is why "surely this was the son of God" is juxtaposed with the laughter and mockery and casting of lots. It's a moment of humanity, a revelation of the identity of the human one. It's the wondrous awe of humanity revealed in and by the Son of Man.

And, that's precisely what Michael's question is about - the disordering of the imago dei. Salvation in Jesus isn't a cognitive, immaterial reality but, rather, the glory of a human fully alive - to reference both another recent conversation on Michael's page and a famous quote from Irenaeus, who is a hero of a dear Catholic friend of mine. BECAUSE Jesus is the litmus test for our humanity (well, and because he is Life; i.e., because he is alive), his body is our salvation.

Notice how well Willie Jennings' narration of our trauma also describes what's happening in Pablo Picasso's 1930 painting "Crucifixion," above. Jennings speaks "thinking of peoples together with regard to race," "uncoupling of identities from specific places," "pulled into a boundary-less reality" as formative practices towards an identity he names "Whiteness." Jennings here teaches me the deeply profound lesson that our racial dis-ease is connected to and deeply resonates with the lessons in our "displacement" taught to me previously but in different ways by the modern architecture of Le Corbusier and by the writings on technology by the Catholic professor and public figure Marshall McLuhan. Jennings' telling the story of our displacement thus resonates with me deeply.

Picasso's paintings image the same displaced scene of our humanity from multiple angles at the same time. As we uncouple from our actuality - and that of Jesus - and identify with Picasso's re-presentation of Christ's crucifixion, we are "uncoupling our identity from the specific place" of Palestine, and we are "pulled into a boundary-less reality."

We can recognize glimpses of Christ's clothes being displaced from his body as his worth is traumatically enfolded into the value generated by the casting of lots (hello late consumer Capitalism). We see a soldier piercing his side. We see blood and sky and vegetation and cross. And, all the while, blood and sky and flesh and vegetation and dirt and divinity are not interwoven with one another, as in the actual pierced body of Christ. Rather, from our position of identification with our dissociative traumatic memory, where we float as ghosts above the earth, we are lost inside an empty unknowing whether what we become and behold is greenery or cloud, sky or earth, a body or a thought.

The interpretive key to understanding why we think of salvation as an immaterial, cognitive reality is not to be found in our thinking, nor in its history - especially not primarily or singularly. The interpretive key to seeing our humanity and our inhumanity, our brutality and our compassion, our depravity and our flourishing - in short, our our salvation and our death - is the traumatized body of Jesus Christ.