tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-149867462024-03-07T00:39:02.731-08:00The Golden AssThe horizon is blood dripping from slain Lamb. The heavens are flooded with grace. We’re all drowning in the arc of Noah’s Tree. Hanging here in the Breathstorm. Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.comBlogger270125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-32533232294961662632021-07-11T13:15:00.007-07:002021-07-11T13:55:17.908-07:00Architecture and Discipleship: The Salk Institute and Incarnation <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxFlLfBguLoLy9BS4Npz9jz-cm3UVz-oCQXseB2jCR4sTPp7SQ4CZehFE5zVMpJ2F7kcvG6zrKP0Ihdq9bnnTLrxuVrVHaWqfv8gx4f_RHO4IuG8qSxIwBrCi4FD2StUTWqVNfyw/s1867/Salk+collage.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="600" data-original-height="997" data-original-width="1867" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxFlLfBguLoLy9BS4Npz9jz-cm3UVz-oCQXseB2jCR4sTPp7SQ4CZehFE5zVMpJ2F7kcvG6zrKP0Ihdq9bnnTLrxuVrVHaWqfv8gx4f_RHO4IuG8qSxIwBrCi4FD2StUTWqVNfyw/s600/Salk+collage.jpg"/></a></div>
I'm part of an "Architecture Shaming" group on Facebook. Often, it's hilarious. But, it has also spurred some rather interesting - or even intense - discussions, posts, and thoughts. I realized they might often be helpful in ways that speak to worlds outside that of Architecture. So, I decided to start writing some of the lessons down. It makes sense, then, that I swiped a couple of the above screenshots from <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/architectureshaming/posts/920357375177913/" target="_blank">THIS FACEBOOK POST</a> in that group.<br />
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A false comparison of similarity between Architect Louis I. Kahn's Salk Institute and Expo '67 is helpful for instruction in a lot of ways. I think the massive differences between them are easy for us to miss, but hugely important, in many ways.<br />
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Here is that false comparison typed out as a description of the Salk Institute, in case you can't read it in the collage here:<br />
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<blockquote>"[W]ell, the part shown here is dreadfully drab and must cook in the scorching sun. It’s a horrible, endless mass of concrete, with no plants or shade anywhere. I hate it for the glare of all the damn concrete and tile (besides which it’s just a bunch of boxes, like back at Expo ‘67). Nay, verily."</blockquote> <br />
This can help teach us about our everyday perception and interpretation of our built environment, as well as about how said everyday lived environment is shaped by and reflects influence from larger socio-political concerns and discourse. What does something so simple that we take take it for granted, such as our perception of a building, tell us about ourselves? How does it tell us this?<br />
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Let's take this person's response to Louis I. Kahn's Salk Institute as a kind of microcosm where these questions play themselves out:<br />
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1. On the topic of "lack of shade," the entire central Plaza at Salk was originally a garden. An Institute of human learning was to point indicatively back to the Garden where the relationship between an intimate knowing of God, "nature," and one another was distorted and disordered by a vain search for a different kind of knowing. Kahn changed his design, however, after touring the site with another famous architect named Louis Barragan, who said, "That's not a garden. It's a façade to the sky."<br />
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This change was made for completely different reasons from why the Brutalism of Expo '67 presents as "just a horrible, endless mass of concrete." (See #4 and #5, below)<br />
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And, this decision to change from garden to "façade to the sky" speaks to our relationship with simplicity and complexity. Humans, like Architects, can have a complex and competing set of concerns that are ordered towards a common end or aim. Decisions are often made with those competing concerns in mind within a larger desire for one aim or end. This can be very complex. We tend to imagine that our decisions are and must be more simple or simplistic, and made towards competing ends. <br />
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Our bodies and our perceptions inhabit and are interwoven with this complexity of our mental, written, historical, and built environment. Growth into our humanity, discipleship, is, just as in Architecture, a matter of giving order to this complexity towards the good and beautiful.
This complexity of concerns and decisions with either varying or similar aims has parallels for how we make decisions of how to relate communally, politically, on social media. If we imagine all decisions simplistically towards competing ends or desires, we are more likely to relate antagonistically. Just as the person above likely imagines that Lou Kahn is unconcerned with providing shade, or that Kahn's only desire is for an aesthetic artifact, actual humanity be damned (which is actually completely untrue about Kahn), progressives and conservatives often imagine that the other doesn't care at all about what they care about or has completely antagonistic desires rather than varying means to desired common goods (which is often, though not always quite untrue about "the other", in either case).<br />
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And, speaking of the relationship between knowledge and intimacy: just as the above person who hates the Salk Institute would have a more "correct" understanding of Lou Kahn's work if he took the time, effort, and care - in other words, the love - to relate to it more intimately, so Progressives and Conservatives may be able to work together (at least a little) more harmoniously if they were to function with an imagination for a different and better relationship between knowledge and intimacy formed by and in love. <br />
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With a fuller imagination for the relationship between complexity and simplicity, intimacy and knowledge, we can better work towards the good and the beautiful - like Lou Kahn here at Salk.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj83om8Ee15J3AUczKCo-McNg_oov0FKXQkawP2JCt7cYP5mlVOumoos0gwcZ_zc0BD3B1JKyp1aiQkXsnzPkMG_6tic3uSRgi8_URp2bK5P6xJbzNF350_nHgl4m2EtVia3Y0qvQ/s800/Salk+04.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="800" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj83om8Ee15J3AUczKCo-McNg_oov0FKXQkawP2JCt7cYP5mlVOumoos0gwcZ_zc0BD3B1JKyp1aiQkXsnzPkMG_6tic3uSRgi8_URp2bK5P6xJbzNF350_nHgl4m2EtVia3Y0qvQ/s400/Salk+04.jpg"/></a></div>
2. Said plaza in question has a small artificial stream running through it, down to a pool at the end closest to the ocean. The entire building site is a microcosm for how the elements of nature relate to one another. A bit like how science is meant to function.<br />
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In everything we do, humans always tell stories that interpret the world.<br />
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I grew up in a fundamentalism that believed it was not interpreting the world or the scriptures but, instead, only gleaning "the facts" and then teaching them. I've seen this in our political discourse, as well. <br />
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The Brutalism of Expo '67 also doesn't believe it tells organizing and interpretive stories. Expo '67 is a Fundamentalist. It believes it is presenting to you the "bare facts" of human experience. It's not; that's a lie. The abstract form and volume of its supposed visual appeal IS ITSELF the telling of a particular human story. So Architecture is what first began to teach me about my own Fundamentalism. This was, for me, a humbling. <br />
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The reason this is important, besides my humbling, is because the question of what story we are inhabiting is a question of whether our path is aimed towards life or death. And, once our humanity is abstracted, we are already dead.<br />
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3. The wood that you can see but is downplayed in the photos here of Salk is vitally important in person. The wood brings the image of human nobility in the concrete - that appears at once as having both glorious weight and wings of light - down to the scale of human touch. So, when you are there "in person," it's not alienating.<br />
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Brutalist buildings, on the other hand, do not tend to these questions of touch. And, they only tend to the questions of human scale in order for the abstraction of their form to meet their function.<br />
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When we presume to "just give the facts," we rely on abstracted information in a mediumless vacuum for our alienated knowing inside a loss of intimacy. At this point, we have lost the importance of human touch. When we do this as Christians, we have lost the humanity of Jesus. This means we've lost our own, as well. The story Lou Kahn tells us as a Jewish Architect about our relationship to our body and to the elements of creation can teach us not only about the Incarnation of Jesus but its importance to our humanity in our everyday experience, perception, and interpretation of the world. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_7hUSZj0osphvWxoGE6gY9Nd59LDRFtc2hn0V5gMURgWGNGkEA4TfYLdMsxfcF5NOZIoC0j4vFmUESfN92b88Fh9-R0bD6b51A7BvUQkfhgI0wMcoUr3_x0G73qgXljOLcyzeTQ/s900/Salk+03.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="538" data-original-width="900" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_7hUSZj0osphvWxoGE6gY9Nd59LDRFtc2hn0V5gMURgWGNGkEA4TfYLdMsxfcF5NOZIoC0j4vFmUESfN92b88Fh9-R0bD6b51A7BvUQkfhgI0wMcoUr3_x0G73qgXljOLcyzeTQ/s400/Salk+03.jpg"/></a></div>
4. Salk is not "a horrible, endless mass of concrete" ALSO because it invites us to listen while a material and it's weight, the elements of creation, powerfully and movingly speak for themselves - specifically rather than needing to be plastered, painted, or otherwise "covered" in order to put on a dead display of visual appeal. Paul talks about this in his letter to the Corinthians (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+1-2&version=NRSV" target="_blank">1 Cor. 1 & 2</a>).<br />
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Brutalist buildings tend to revel in the visual delight of changes and movement of abstract form and volume. They do not "speak" to us of the inextricably interwoven relationship between the mass of earth and light of heaven, body and mind. Expo '67 told no story about and had no purposeful relationship with the weight of the body and the earth in figurative relationship with what's "above" and lighter, gravity in relationship with levity, heaven in relationship with earth. It purposefully defied that story, actually. <br />
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In comparison, that's one of the primary things Louis I. Kahn is doing at Salk, and in the rest of his work - is telling the story of the relationship between "heaven and earth." He's Jewish, with a history of relating to the Temple as the place where the Spirit of God comes to rest here. And, the <i>difference between</i> the <i>second photo</i> here (more open, more air, more light, more "seen," rising like fire towards the fire of the sun) and <i>below</i> photo (more closed, more heavy, more shadow, more mystery, standing firmly upon the authoritative glory of the earth) speaks to this (discussed in #4 here and in #5, below), particularly about the inextricably interwoven relationship between gravity and levity, earth and sky, body and mind. But, again, this is more easily "heared" and "seen" "in person" as compared to in photos.<br />
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Our secularism isn't merely ideological. The story it tells is woven through the senses and perceptions of our everyday experience of the world. As Christians, our ideological culture wars thus miss the boat when they respond to what happens in the everyday of our materiality and our body with abstracted ideological pursuits. Our ideologies cover over our unrecognized shame and visceral disgust with disembodied information about the world in the same way that we think we need to cover over concrete with white paint rather than allowing ourselves to submit and receive it into our senses.<br />
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5. Salk Institute is not "a horrible, endless mass of concrete" ALSO because it faces and reflects, submits and bows to the elements of nature which make it what it is in the first place. Concrete imitates stone, from mother earth. The entire appearance and edification, or presentation and construction of the building is a microcosm for relationships between the ground of existence and what appears, and between "nature" and humanity - as Kahn discusses in his piece of writing called Silence and Light (which can be read <a href="http://ktstudiokt.net/KT_Studio_KT/ARCH3501_FA07/Entries/2007/8/27_Ex_1.1_Essay_on_Light_and_Architecture_files/Kahn%20Silence%20and%20Light%201968.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3BarzfgTaWCCHFmFjUVDl8yl7h3_To_ScToDlOP3mIlcrVP70a3EiCYsM" target="_blank">HERE</a>, if interested). <br />
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Even the way he organizes and plants the trees in the middle of miniature rock-gardens that appear between the parking lot and the building, which do provide shade, participates in this dynamic of allowing a thing to "speak" for itself in an ordered fashion, rather than getting lost in our usual cacophony of chaotic sound. <br />
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Indeed, the light and shadow that plays upon the building and ground itself is key to this dynamic, as well - in relation to the sun. And, it's stunningly powerful. <br />
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Expo 67 has no interest in re-organizing the economy of our sense and perception. Expo 67 is content to be shaped by our default drive to raise our investment through higher "interest." This is accomplished with a multiplicity of purely visual changes (without concern for the weight of the body or the earth, which is not seen in photos). Expo '67 "steals the show" from the elements of nature and carries an abstract message of "form" and "volume" rather than allowing what stands before us to BOTH ACTUALLY speak for itself AND step back in submission to earth and sky.
Lou Kahn was a prophet who "saw the world differently" and taught me to do the same. He died $5000,000 in debt. Expo '67 is a member of the King's court using the default tools of the world's powers for its own (visual) "interests." Whether architects or not, we all have such choices to make. And, we are presented with them in our everyday sensory and perceptual experience of the world. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnyYObDeBDAC8-o_kavgk0u3gOt6FFwosroKfXk04k9pRDmElUNB8S_pZ2KYcs2ozMe60O7qgDJGL9CiyxtOfbxMvEbpAhM1hYejYvLJJY1n7oIkLHb2RG_z2p9q36Rh1HuF7WtQ/s720/Salk+05.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="720" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnyYObDeBDAC8-o_kavgk0u3gOt6FFwosroKfXk04k9pRDmElUNB8S_pZ2KYcs2ozMe60O7qgDJGL9CiyxtOfbxMvEbpAhM1hYejYvLJJY1n7oIkLHb2RG_z2p9q36Rh1HuF7WtQ/s400/Salk+05.jpg"/></a></div>
6. Brutalist buildings like at Expo '67 are not figurative. No figures appear. Again, they are all abstract form and volume. <br />
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In Kahn's work in general, and at Salk Institute in particular, subtle human figures appear as mirrors before us, mirrors of and to the humanity who makes it appear. This is difficult to see in photos, because what is meant to appear is an embodied figure who carries weight upon the glory of the earth, in relation to the levity of air and fire. <br />
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Kahn's buildings, in the same way as his Jewish Torah, thus point us to he who is the fulfillment of his scripture, the figure who is the fulfillment of all con-figurings. We actually and actively sense this in our very bodies as we stand before and behold the figures themselves. Vacuumed abstractions, whether presented to us in the form of buildings, sermons, or political speeches do no such figurative pointing.<br />
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Salk Institute is to Expo 67 as Theological readings of scriptures such as Typological or Allegorical interpretation is to the Historical-Critical method of exegesis. <br />
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7. In our Romanticism and in our capitalism that concentrates all intimacy upon the nuclear family, we associate love with "coziness" or comfort. This is one of the primary things we are often reacting against with our repulsion from Expo '67. <br />
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Lou Kahn's purposeful and explicit "Monumentality" apparent in, by, and through his buildings teaches or reminds us that love is (at least also) about edification and dignity. Love "builds up," like an "elevation." <br />
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The "elevation" of Expo '67 is a drawing on a piece of paper. The "elevation" of Kahn's Salk Institute is an invitation to you and me to be lifted up, to be edified, to be loved. Where is the "elevation" of our sermons and political speech embodied, and how do we discern this? <br />
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8. The person whose response I am highlighting here had not been to the Salk Institute. Kahn's works in general are not made for photographs but for embodied relationship (i.e. to be "experienced in person"). <br />
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Humans and disciples are also not made to learn and be instructed by images or words on screens or on paper but through, in, and by embodied relationship. Architecture was what first taught me about Incarnation. <br />Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-25408870344550086022021-04-18T15:54:00.020-07:002021-04-18T20:42:40.679-07:00AM I PETER OR THE GUARD? Reflections on Discipleship and Prison Abolition<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQO7C0jM4UQVLJLxyIfL-Ym9upbm4bhdyTeWGqp4VezByja5AQGr453DFSxo558IoVCs2x8doL0eGCqJhFdUwL0_jYUFu20NB4HJHJUO14YyY_rA1haz13MSrlhf8dMTR0rNhijQ/s779/mass+incarceration+2.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="779" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQO7C0jM4UQVLJLxyIfL-Ym9upbm4bhdyTeWGqp4VezByja5AQGr453DFSxo558IoVCs2x8doL0eGCqJhFdUwL0_jYUFu20NB4HJHJUO14YyY_rA1haz13MSrlhf8dMTR0rNhijQ/s400/mass+incarceration+2.jpg"/></a></div>
<blockquote>"Just as we never leave the presence of the Spirit in Luke's narrative, we never leave sight of the prison. It is always with us, always offering the antithesis to the good news. The prison always announces worldly power and reveals those intoxicated with the lust for violence, but not primarily from the site of the cell but from the place of the warden, the guards, and those benefitting financially and politically from the mechanisms of incarceration. The church cannot and must not ever seek to hide itself from the prison. Confrontation with it is fundamental to our ordination, our way of following Jesus." - Willie Jennings, on Acts 12 and Peter's imprisonment by Herod <br /></blockquote>
The following is my reflecting on some revelations that came upon me in my conversation yesterday morning with my friend Michael Gonzalez, who is African American and has gotten involved in some prison abolotion work in his home city of Philadelphia. These reflections will be interwoven with quotes from Willie Jennings' commentary on the book of Acts. Through this interweaving, I am being taught that my relationship with prison and the "justice system," whatever my relationship with them, is inextricably interwoven with my discipleship. <br />
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To that point, I have never been able to face, name, and own what happens in my body WHEN I AM NEAR A PRISON, whether in person or through a screen. Whenever I am in the presence of one, I can now recognize that what my body experiences is FEAR. When seeing someone actually ENTER a prison, if identifying with a character on the "safe" side of all the fencing and other mechanisms of "security", I feel a safety that feels just as unnameably uneasy as safe.<br />
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Why was I not able to name this fear? Why is the feeling of safety so uneasy? Because trauma. Because we need angels to awken us to our full humanity.<br />
<blockquote>John 20:<br />
"19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for FEAR of the Jew[ish authorities], Jesus came and stood among them and said, 'Peace be with you.' 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced..."<br /></blockquote>
Jesus shares in our trauma, and we are called and invited to follow him - by, in, and through His Spirit - in overcoming it. The disciples WERE IN PRISON, and Jesus was CALLING THEM OUT of it and INTO FREEDOM.<br />
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Why was I not able to name this fear? Why is the feeling of safety so uneasy? Because we need angels to awken us to our full humanity.<br />
<blockquote>"Nothing speaks of dehumanization more than the stripping away of familiar clothing, the exposing of the body to nakedness and shame, and the donning of garments that remind the prisoner of a suspended identity and a loss of story. But here the angel demands Peter dress himself for the journey and prepare himself for freedom. The angel tells Peter to put back on his clothing and take back his life...God frees and God prepares Peter for freedom. We must do the same with those who seek to liberate." - Willie Jennings, on Acts 12 and Peter's prison break</blockquote>
My takeaway: PETER'S PRISON BREAK IS NOT SEPARATE from Peter's original invitation and call to discipleship. Just as Peter needed Jesus to call him out of his shame and into life, to call him out of his distorted image of God, reality, and of himself on that lake, so Peter needed the same as he lay in prison, bound to shame, death, and alienation. So, speaking of Peter's original call, I've really missed the boat on this! Just as Peter did when he tried to fish by himself. <br />
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When I was first exposed enough to prison abolition to become interested in it, I thought it was a complete thing I tie or bind myself to, an accomplished or finished thing in the world with which I identify. This was partly a function of my inability to name both my fear and our call as disciples out of it. But we don't become an abolitionist. We work towards abolition. We are becoming abolitionists. Abolition isn't a branding, a commodity I possess. We don't choose it by ourselves.<br />
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Why was I not able to name this fear "in my body" whenever I came near a prison? Why was the feeling of safety so uneasy? Because I imagined myself detached from it.
<blockquote>"Of course, people do horrible things worthy of prison and tied to capital punishment.<br />
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But Christians are given a wider lens than media fictions of crime and punishment. We have an inheritance born of life inside the cell, and the intimate knowledge of power misused through the facile foolishness of equating crime and punishment with wickedness and righteousness. The state wants us to forget what we know and see only singular bodies, dangerous and detached, kept from us and our possessions only by the iron power of kings and rulers. But the church is formed in a pedagogy of prison that we must never forget, lest we forget ourselves and forsake our mission." - Willie Jennings on Acts 12 and Peter's Prison Break</blockquote>
My takeaway: FREEDOM FROM PRISON IS INEXTRICABLY BOUND TO AND INTERWOVEN WITH OUR DISCIPLESHIP. If I am a disciple of Jesus, I cannot possibly be detached from it. I cannot be kept safe from prison, nor from all the mechanisms and levers that keep some people in and others outside the bounds of "the system's" jurisdiction. I am either the guard, or I am Peter. But either way, I am INSIDE the story.<br />
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When I was first exposed to prison abolition, I thought it was idealistic. This was partly a function of my detachment, and of my forgetting of our mission. But prison abolition isn't a detached ideal. It's a work from inside.
<blockquote>"Great tragedy ends this story beginning with the fate of the guards. To be a guard is to be bound to violence and death. It is work, but it is not good work. Anybody who claims its goodness is lying to themselves. The best thing that might be claimed is its necessity in a system that wants us all to confess its necessity....These guards were there to maintain the captivity of other human beings, and once Peter escaped, the obvious question pressed on the guards was one of allegiance: Are you working for the opposition?...Could it be that the church must now seek the deliverance of not just the prisoner but also the guards?" - Willie Jennings, on Acts 12 and Peter's prison break, and on the death of the guards</blockquote>
When I was first exposed to prison abolition, I thought it was an alternative justice system. I was thinking of it that way in my abstracted Whiteness that thinks everything together - figuratively, "from above." I was reading the story of Acts 12 as a prison guard, as as master who is in charge of detached surveillance of our world to maintain its safety and beauty. But abolition isn't a work a guard gives himself to. And abolition isn't a system. Abolition is a fragment work of entrusting myself to a God who invites me into nonviolence and embodies the crumbling of the system. It's not a system, because I don't know the outcome. It's not a system, because, with it, I touch my creatureliness.<br />
<blockquote>"We are all ripe to be made prison guards whether we work in prison or not, because we are slowly being desensitized to prison horrors, slowly being baptized in capitalist logic as the natural order of things, and slowly being brainwashed into believing that Christianity goes hand in glove with the pseudo-morality of our judicial and penal systems. Every increase of the guard population is an increase in the power of death, every new hire who draws a paycheck from prison work draws more death into society, and every church that sits silently at this expansion denies the power of deliverance given them by our risen savior." - Willie Jennings, on Acts 12</blockquote>
MY TAKEAWAY: OK FREEDOM FROM (the nakedness, shame, and alienation of) PRISON IS INEXTRICABLY BOUND TO THE WORK OF OUR DISCIPLESHIP. <br />
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When I was first exposed enough to prison abolition to become interested in it, I was hesitant. When there were gunshots in my parking lot, and when my downstairs Latino neighbor was abusing his significant other (and they both later ended up in jail later for grand larceny), I called the police.
Now I'm seeing that I did that as an act of convenience for me. Abolition is a commitment to sacrificial love. Now I'm seeing that as an act of hopelessness. I had no imagination for any other way to relate to my neighbor. But abolition is a commitment to the crumbling of the system that lynched God, an embodiment of hope. <br />
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It's true that I did call the police partly because those neighbors showed me who they are and what they want. They do not care about other people. But hope is hope in restoration. And what is love that doesn't hope? What is love that doesn't center the other? These questions are inextricably bound to my discipleship. <br />
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These questions are bound up in my discipleship for all the reasons I've already said. If the scriptures are our script for the world, then I'm either the guard or Peter. This is difficult to see and touch, because prison is a system that traumatizes. And, trauma dissociates. Jesus shares our trauma and invites us to overcome it with him. He even demands it. In the grace of his presence with us, he reaches out and extends to us the overcoming of his fear and the facing and naming of my vain sense of safety and security that does not love. He calls to me for my awakening from the sleep of my discipleship in Gethsemane when our humanity - which is stripped from us by the carceral system that crumbles in Jesus' hands - is at stake. And, in His very person through the powerful work of the Spirit, he shares with us a re-membering of the body from which we dissociatively detatch in allegiance to our American idols of false justice that shames, alienates, and kills. These questions of care, hope, and restoration in relation to my neighbors are interwoven with my discipleship in all of these ways. <br />
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But, the FIRST reason these questions are firstly about my discipleship is becuase my calling the police on that couple and when there were gun shots in my parking lot was my functioning as though our police, "justice," and prison system are my true gods. I was inhabiting a world governed by those systems, and I was responding to events in my life as though those systems have authoirty over me, as though I have given my allegiance to them. If, however, that system destroys hope and drains life, if what it does is bring shame, alienation, and death - if it lynched God - then my living according to my fear and my convenience is my idolatry. It's a lie. The system that is crumbling between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday is built on, depends on, and in fact is MEANT to perpetuate precisely the fear, self-centereddness, and hopelessness by which I function when I can't even begin to imagine prison aboltion. If Jesus is king, then obedience means freedom. Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-39926435883085586632021-02-04T16:30:00.011-08:002021-02-04T17:21:34.680-08:00Architecture and Discipleship: Masonry and Sex, Orpheus and Jesus<blockquote>"You say to a brick, 'What do you want, brick?' And brick says to you, 'I like an arch.' And you say to brick, 'Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.' And then you say: 'What do you think of that, brick?' Brick says: 'I like an arch.'"
- Louis. I. Kahn<br /></blockquote>
A building is a figure or image, and an extension of the humanity who makes it. Brick is our sexuality, our desire for intimacy. <br />
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Our word orifice comes from the Greek (and Roman) myth of Orpheus. An orifice is an opening in the body, or in a building. Sex is about openings in the body and in the heart. And, in the end, Orpheus was torn apart by the Bacchantes, companions to and servants of Dionysius. <br />
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<b>Drawing of a window in a town in the desert in Spain between Bilbao and Barcelona (drawing by me):</b><br />
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The use of a lintel to create an opening is Orpheus “looking back.” Listening to the brick is Jesus as our true humanity. Orpheus uses and trusts in his power to obtain the impossible. A pastor friend of mine has a history of using compassion and curiosity, the practice of listening, as a tool to obtain the intimacy he wants. I can tend to use my muscles and my words to do the same. Orpheus used the power of his song. <br />
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So, appropriate to the way I can tend to practice obtaining intimacy with my own power, I'm noticing that part of me wants to skip ahead to the most intimate expressions of what love means when I first meet someone. This moment is a good lesson in the fact that love is embodied and cultivated over time. But that image of the fullness of intimacy that appears in the mind isn't necessarily a bad thing. It belongs to the nature of such relationships. <br />
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Notably, though, it's our technologies of the global village that have trained me to imagine that such a "skipping ahead" can be fulfilled "in the flesh" rather than as an image in the imagination that belongs within the limits of the nature of the embodied, sexually intimate relationship that is cultivated over time.<br />
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I am imagining this "fulfillment" of aspirational wishes as an analogy to the late modern fulfillment - through sociology, ideology, science, and the power of technology - of early modern aspiration to greater and higher levels of human mastery, with new modes of speculative knowledge.<br />
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In other words, I am trained through the power of the technology of digital internet media that shapes me to put myself in the place of God, to make my imagined aspirations immediately appear on earth as they are in heaven, rather than to patiently cultivate what all of humanity desires in the embodied flesh of humanity over time, Incarnationally.<br />
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In other words, the speed and ease of, and the power required in the making of any orifice of any size, any where, and at any time, with a lintel, is, in my analogy, the arrogance of “manifest destiny” taking shape in the order of sexual intimacy.
<blockquote>"God wept, because human nature had fallen to such an extent that, after being expelled from eternity, it had come to love the lower world. God wept, because those who could be immortal, the devil made mortal. God wept, because those whom he had rewarded with every benefit and had placed under his power, those who he had set in paradise, among flowers and lilies without any hardship, the devil, by teaching them to sin, exiled from almost every delight. God wept, because those who he had created innocent, the devil through his wickedness, caused to be found guilty." - quote from a fourth century Christian leader, Potamius of Lisbon from <a href="https://newhumanityinstitute.wordpress.com/2021/01/27/atonement-theories-anger-part-3-exploring-what-made-jesus-angry/?fbclid=IwAR30l4xObPUKuqVt5WtFgRXkzISkRXdd_Zu09o0SJrJujKHgCltzxEYxeCE%20" target="_blank">THIS BLOG POST</a>, by Mako Nagasawa. </blockquote>
Here - in our specific technological context of the global village - the fall to mortality from immortality is inverted to the desire for immediate delight as an aspiration to overcome humanity's relationship with time, with and under our own power (i.e. - "it had come to love the lower world"). <br />
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Just as Orpheus, relying on the power of his song, “looked back” out of fear and anxiety of the loss of his love, I am similarly tempted – out of a fear and anxiety of being “exiled from almost every delight” from an intimacy and care that otherwise stands before me as the fullness of creation itself, an intimacy and care whose power I inherently carry and bear in my body - to reach above the humility of my station to an immediate place in the intimate glories of heaven. Orpheus, Nimrod, and myself all have this temptation in common. <br />
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The beautiful, patient crafting of an arch over the weight of time in accordance with the nature of the brick, however, is proper and appropriate human cultivation of intimacy embodied slowly in and over time. It is my tending to what I had imagined I was exiled from. Jesus shares his power and presence (intimacy) with us and leads us to life, shares his life with us. We could say he is our master mason who invites us to do the same, to follow him in this, to build (intimacy) the way he builds. <br />
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I say, “You see all those people coupling up. Yeah, that’s not for you.” God says, “Be fruitful and multiply.” <br />
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To use a lintel to create an orifice is to conceive of and treat the wall as an abstract, mechanical plane and to then, of course, use foreign material to mechanically create an opening where you want. It was around the previously referenced time of late modernity’s powerful technological, economic, and political fulfillment of early modernity’s vision when steel and concrete began to carry the structural weight of a building, and when brick began to be treated either as a mere abstracted mechanical plane, or exclusively as a performative display of “outer” flesh. A building is a figure or image, and an extension of the humanity who makes it, so these bifurcations of our humanity between natural and supernatural, body and soul, spirit and flesh that appeared in modern anthropology also appeared in our modern buildings. Or did the image of humanity in our buildings also appear in our anthropology and in our epistemology?<br />
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Our history is my history, so this is both narration and confession. <br />
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A lintel is sexual intimacy with anyone, anywhere, any time, and any how – because my body is conceived of and treated as a mechanical abstraction. To quote Willie Jennings: “[B]odies are rendered in this vision of intimacy into dumb machines activated only by and through narratives of sexual consumption.” Speaking of consumption, as Lou Kahn noted, a lintel is cheaper and more efficient. <br />
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To listen to the brick rather than to treat it as merely abstract plane or performative display, however, is to conceive of and treat the wall as a body, to listen to the desires of my body. An arch is hearing built into sexual desire also desires for care and economic security, intimacy and connection or belonging, and faithfulness and dignity. And it is to enact sexual desire as though it is joined to them (i.e. marriage). An arch lovingly tends to the limits of the brick as gift rather than to either desire to reach beyond them or to imagine one’s self constrained by them. This acceptance of the givenness of the nature of the brick is extraordinarily “expensive” and “inefficient.” <br />
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A lintel is abuse of the brick (even to the point of often cutting it, if need be). It is tolerating my sexuality being treated as an efficient tool and a cheap possession – and treating others that way, too. The arch is the honoring of the beauty and dignity of the brick, of our sexuality, of the intimacy that’s built into our very bodies. I am aware that the drawing above is of neither an arch nor a concrete (nor steel) lintel. But, when my Architecture professor saw it, he recognized the orphic nature of it, the call and invitation into intimacy and our dignity, and he said, “THAT is an elevation.” He said that, because it elevates - as compared to the fact that the myth of Orpheus ends in his very body being torn apart, his falling. <br />
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To use a lintel is to exert power and control over the brick (even to the point of cutting it if need be), to be trapped in the tension between patriarchal heroism and control versus reactionary freedom, between purity culture and liberation. An opening carved out of the unity of the body with the reconciling joining of the two sides of the opening with an arch, however evokes the beauty of mutual desire that gives shape to the burdens and efforts enacted upon and by my body. <br />
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The lintel is the status quo, the norm. This is part of why Louis I. Kahn died $500,000 in debt. It’s why healthy sexuality is so difficult for me, for us. The arch is the disruption of our current technological, economic, and political power systems and structures. <br />
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In the making of an arch, life and death are at stake. A master mason “stood under” the scaffolding of an arch as it was being removed. This is the root of our word “understanding.” This is our reliance on the scaffolding put in place by the Master of our desires in the “Word that comes from above.” This Master is the fulfillment of our humanity, the full union of dirt and divinity. In the placement of a lintel over an opening, we use power tools to enforce our will, and we are able to imagine that life and death are never encountered. But this is only because the building never really lives and moves; it doesn’t really carry its own weight. Here, “the building” is dignity and beauty of our sexuality and our intimacy that is inherent to all of our relatings. <br />
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With a concrete or steel lintel, the brick has no inherent dignity; it is only a tool to get what I want. It is using both the brick and the lintel to get what I want, which is presumed to be reached for and grasped towards from outside the brick itself, from outside the intimacy woven into all human relatings. Remember that Orpheus uses and trusts in his power to obtain the impossible. Jesus, on the other hand, shares his power and presence (intimacy) with us and leads us to life, shares his life with us. He invites us to do the same, to follow him in this.<br />
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So, to forego the use of a lintel and to tend to the nature of the brick is to create an entirely new and different building. It is to die to the old person and to become new in the one who shares his full humanity with us. <br />
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With an arch, then, we are lovingly tending to the nature of the brick to follow the plan of the body of the building. We are using our agency to direct the intimacy that’s woven into all human relating and inherent to the brick itself. Intimacy is about openings in the body and in the heart. Some intimacies belong and are ordered towards different rooms of the house. An appropriate relational order is established over the time of the relatings. We invite people through orifices into the appropriate rooms: porch, den, dining room. And, the particular intimacy of the husband and wife is framed by the orifice leading to the bedroom. “Tend to your heart with all diligence; For out of it are the ways to life.” – Proverbs 4: 23. <br />
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In other words, this blog post is like an architectural plan to help me find my way through the intimacies woven into creation. <br />
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So, in masonry, the wall and arch are not built brick by brick, individually. The bricks are woven – turned and mutually mirrored – as groups of three into a unified mass that, in the end, acts as one together. In order for this to ring true, with a building that stands upright and beautiful as a harmonious union with integrity among its elements, the joinings have to be tended to with love - just as in human joinings. <br />
<blockquote>“Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander. 2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation— 3 if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.
4 Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and 5 like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
- 1 Peter 2</blockquote>Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-2767587743841948872020-12-24T18:41:00.003-08:002020-12-24T18:47:57.605-08:00The Conception of God<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbnDSpGnUST4ru3TbodmT4xJ-jtsMKCm1GMX_PYCUNwYbByBH7ENX33SlbnCr4Bnyvo65y4OTI4bSQK_DM3whdiMLkGUrAYIRCpcCtSN_moQ-ud6o_1c0WLn3tl_3pIu2uMkg00Q/s320/theotokos.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="213" data-original-width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbnDSpGnUST4ru3TbodmT4xJ-jtsMKCm1GMX_PYCUNwYbByBH7ENX33SlbnCr4Bnyvo65y4OTI4bSQK_DM3whdiMLkGUrAYIRCpcCtSN_moQ-ud6o_1c0WLn3tl_3pIu2uMkg00Q/s320/theotokos.jpg"/></a></div>
The Conception of God <br />
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Echo of eternity, this warming moment <br />
Like the burning bush fire <br />
For an unexplainably extended time <br />
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Penetration of the Silent Word speaking <br />
Felt as soft wind on her skin <br />
As the angel's unexpected light departs <br />
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Surprise imagining in Silence coming <br />
Seed planting into my praying <br />
Mary's joyous Annunciation <br />
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(poem by me, inspired by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=digKEUFs4Kw" target="_blank">the the breath of God outside as I was praying today</a>, on Chritmas Eve, 2020) <br />
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This week, in the context of Advent, of the stories of Mary, Joseph, and the Virgin Birth, and of Zechariah's silence, Elizabeth, and John the Baptist, I've been thinking of the connection between their stories and ours. <br />
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I've been meditating on how salvation isn't and can't be of ourselves and is and must therefore be found in our waiting on a growth and edification that, yes, we participate in and consent to but whose seed, no, we don't plant. I've been pondering in my heart that and how salvation does and must thus be in our waiting like in a pregnancy for it's climax and fulfillment, and that in it, we bear and carry Christ around our path along the world with us, in seed form, joyously and yet with some trepidation and fear that comes with any pregnancy, hoping, longing, and expecting a birth that will radically change our world to such a disorientingly just extent as to change who we are. <br />
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In other words, reflecting on my own death and life, I've been, like Mary, "pondering in my heart" what it means to say "yes" to the Holy Spirit who wasn't only present and at work in Creation, in the desert, in the Judges, in Solomon's Temple, or 2,000 years ago in the form of a messenger sent to His Mother but, in a grace we are now given to see, hear, know, and touch, we are called and invited ourselves, always and this very moment, to practice responding and submitting to with a Creative "Yes." <br />
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Then, some guy in some group I'm in gave voice this week to those things I've been, like Mary, "pondering in my heart", when he said the following:<br />
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<blockquote>A spiritual reading of the doctrine is that the virgin birth is an analogy for Theosis [if interested, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosis_%28Eastern_Christian_theology%29#:~:text=Theosis%2C%20or%20deification%20%28deification%20may,Church%20and%20Eastern%20Catholic%20Churches." target="_blank">click here</a> for more information on "theosis"].<br />
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"When I see the image of the Theotokos in the eastern apse of the church, either with the Child in her womb, which is what the medallion shape signifies, or holding the Child, I see an image of every Christian soul in whom Christ has been born, in whom Christ has taken His place. As far as I know the first ecclesiastical author to have said this is St. Gregory of Nyssa in On Virginity where he says what took place in the Virgin physically or materially must or will take place in every Christian soul spiritually. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the actualization of Christ in the womb of the Virgin and the actualization of Christ in the soul of the believer."<br />
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- Fr. Maximos Constas<br />
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Met Kallistos Ware says the following, when discussing Mariology:<br />
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"Orthodox honour Mary, not only because she is Theotokos, but because she is Panagia, All-Holy. Among all God's creatures, she is the supreme example of synergy or co-operation between the purpose of the deity and human freedom. God, who always respects our liberty of choice, did not wish to become incarnate without the willing consent of His Mother. He waited for her voluntary response: 'Here am I, the servant of the Lord, let it be as you have said' (Luke 1:38). Mary could have refused, she was not merely passive, but an active participant in the mystery."</blockquote>
*******<br />
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Pictured here: Icon of the Theotokos (meaning "birthgiver-of-God") from St John the Baptist Orthodox Church, Warren OH (pic stolen from <a href="https://stjohnswarren.com/theotokosandchrist?fbclid=IwAR3KUeM9_C7zZL72sk1-5gEV3du5CaOgUToQHVRFF_Slh7sCilJxbwR6pLM" target="_blank">here</a>).Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-11983854901643015832020-12-13T15:58:00.024-08:002020-12-20T15:58:28.046-08:00LOVE IN AN AGE OF WAR<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCQLuNXgBIr9t2Oj6bnG5xfm9w1bMahy9Bt2UdYQy-xVsbnCsEmnwMZCiik_2MtNnQ8t22j5B3HVwMfqBAa9SIBM2_OMIk49tXjY82YcZEmghlb4rtlkoMJIpEychJSJ-k_Y5MXg/s1201/jehrico+march.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="1201" data-original-width="720" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCQLuNXgBIr9t2Oj6bnG5xfm9w1bMahy9Bt2UdYQy-xVsbnCsEmnwMZCiik_2MtNnQ8t22j5B3HVwMfqBAa9SIBM2_OMIk49tXjY82YcZEmghlb4rtlkoMJIpEychJSJ-k_Y5MXg/s400/jehrico+march.png"/></a></div>
As Christians, we are taught that Jesus is love. We are also, of course, taught to follow Jesus. However, I have spent most of my life having a very impoverished imagination for what that even means. I am still learning. My training in love through Gravity Leadership has opened my eyes to some ways that Jesus practices love to which, previously, I was mostly blind. <br />
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We all live in a shared socio-communal context. Rival and antagonistic groups of people frame said context in terms of different problems and solutions that are linguistically or discursively irreconcilable to one other. Said context has a particular history that positions or situates different people and groups of people within it in very different ways, ways that lend themselves to the very linguistic antagonisms of competing problems and solutions in the first place. <br />
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Even our history of the shared context we inhabit is itself is a subject or object of antagonistic framing with our speech that we direct towards one another. And, since our history is at stake in the language and narrative framing we choose, so is our future. This antagonism is so deep that if I even begin to name the history and trajectory of our history and future, I am understood to be engaging these antagonisms. What happens in your body if I say the word “racism”? How about “freedom”? <br />
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These discursive linguistic antagonisms that serve as rival stories of the truth of our shared social context in question (and its history and future) tend toward totalizing theories / schemas by which people find themselves and their place in said context. In other words, I am tempted to want my story to be THE story, to be everyone’s story. Hence the above noted irreconcilability. <br />
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So, if we are Christian, we are called and invited to grope towards practices of truth telling and caring in this social context where our language is predominantly tempted to irreconcilable temptation to essentially win a war. How do we train ourselves to practice love in such an impossible situation!? Well, one of the lessons in Gravity Leadership’s Workbook that we train through is called, “Seeing Jesus Practice Grace and Truth.” The idea here is that, when we try to embody and enact the love of Jesus, we are immediately confronted with a tension between, on the one hand, being truthful and honest and, on the other, being “nice.” We have a very difficult time imagining a love that embodies both truth and grace bound up together in the person and work of Jesus, who shares his life with us as we participate with him in the coming of his kingdom OF said love. <br />
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<b>The Authority of Love</b> <br />
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The lectionary reading last Saturday was <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+11%3A+15-33&version=NRSV" target="_blank">Mark 11: 27-33</a>, when the chief priests come and ask Jesus "by what authority do you do these things?" (Temple cleansing, etc). Jesus is like, "By what authority did John baptize, the power of men or of heaven?" <br />
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Similar as for us, there's here a shared context (political exile under the thumb of Rome) with rival sets of linguistically framed problems and solutions. And, there is an entire shared tradition of discourse (rabbis / teachers) by which people vie for authoritative telling of the history and future of the people who are subject to this context. People find themselves and their place in this context by clothing themselves in these authoritative stories. <br />
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All along, Jesus has been not only hinting that the story is ABOUT HIM, but also practicing truth telling and care IN THE GATHERING A PEOPLE TOGETHER AROUND HIIMSELF. By showing them what it means to live the story with himself as the central actor in and of it.
The religious leaders, predictably - in either their context or ours - are like, "Hey YOU'RE not the center! The institution we run is! Don't you know - that's where God is present and at work? What's your deal?" “By what authority do you do these things?” <br />
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Notice that this episode in Mark 11: 27-33, in the wake of the Temple Cleansing, didn't start with Jesus "calling them out." The religious leaders were the ones calling Jesus out. They were coming to him with a harsh truth at the cost of relational connection and belonging. They were seeking to dominate and over-power him. They were in a war they wanted to win. He had just been busy showing his disciples what it means for the story of our shared context to be about himself (including in the Temple cleansing). Then others come along and are like, "umm...wowah dude." <br />
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Note how one of our possible temptations in response to people calling us out is always to justify ourselves, to, in my friend Gino’s words, “spit facts” and win the argument or the war established in the antagonism. As Gino noted in a recent sermon, they even ASK him for SPECIFIC "facts." They ASK him for an "argument." He doesn't engage in that antagonism. He doesn't engage that temptation to prove himself and his place (in the story / world). <br />
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He also doesn't call them out in return. He doesn't shame them, over-power them by telling them why and how wrong they are. In the predominance of our antagonisms, we tend to imagine that Jesus’ asking them, “by what authority does Jon baptize” WAS his “calling out” the religious leaders. But, he doesn’t. He also doesn't shame them in another way. He doesn't disempower them by taking and stealing their responsibility and agency away from them. <br />
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He instead puts them in a position - EMPOWERS THEM - to name and own their real desire. They find themselves unable to do this. If there is any condemnation or death dealing, he lets them step foot into it themselves (just as in, for example, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+12%3A+22-32&version=NRSV" target="_blank">Matt 12: 22-32</a> and <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+3%3A+19-35&version=NRSV" target="_blank">Mark 3: 20-35</a>, "the binding of the strong man" / "the unpardonable sin", which is about my being bound to foreign powers of nation (and family)). Where they come to overpower Jesus, he does not return the favor. <br />
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<b>Parables of Love</b> <br />
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Then, in both <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+21%3A+12-46&version=NRSV" target="_blank">Matthew's</a> and <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+12%3A+1-12&version=NRSV" target="_blank">Mark's</a> versions of this episode in Mark 11: 27-33, Jesus follows this up with parables - of the two sons, of the wicked tenants - that do a number of things that are relevant to what we're talking about: <br />
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1. They give responsibility and agency to those in his audience. They empower them. We tend to miss this, because, in functioning in our discursive or linguistic antagonisms, we again focus on or imagine that these are stories of Jesus "calling out" the religious leaders. We imagine that the he’s giving the harsh truth that’s much needed. <br />
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2. They are foolishly extravagant INVITATIONS into an ongoing practice in time of faithfully reciprocal RELATIONSHIP. I.e. - the CARE into which we are invited to train as disciples of Jesus. This is why it's a parable about SONS. It's why the tenants are given such an important responsibility in relation to and in representation of the Master. Such tasks imply a binding relationship of mutual caring. Again, we tend to miss this, because, in our habitus of functioning in a space of linguistic or discursive antagonistic theories, inside of totalizing stories over our context(s), in our modus operandi of fighting to win a war, we skip in our minds to the failures of the tenants and the religious leaders. But, the INVITATION is not only primary but remains implicit as a choice in the telling of the parables to their audience! <br />
<blockquote>“And so it was with many others; some they beat, and others they killed. 6 He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ 7 But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’” – <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+12%3A+1-12&version=NRSV" target="_blank">Mark 12: 4-7</a>. </blockquote>
In other words, these words from Mark 12 aren’t just about obtaining pie in the sky. They aren’t just about God declaring us “righteous” because of Christ’s dying “in our place” on the cross. They depict an extravagantly abundant, to the point of utter foolishness, desire of God for relational unity with us. This is “the joy set before him” (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=hebrews+12%3A+1-6&version=NRSV" target="_blank">Hebrews 12: 2</a>). <br />
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Again, we tend to imagine that Jesus was “calling out” the “tenants” and the “disobedient son.” Obviously, the parables are also the practicing of truth telling. But, per the above, we tend to miss the invitation to relationship of care - itself in the context of Jesus' gathering a people around himself in the first place (some now call this "organizing?") - that is the real and first thrust of the stories. In fact, "truth" in those parables is inconceivable as a category without the graceful imitating of the person who is the Truth. Truth is also inconceivable as a category here without the previously established empowerment, agency, authority, or responsibility GIVEN to and SHARED WITH those in his audience BY the telling of the parables! <br />
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Speaking of parables, the CBN story depicted above has this caption: <br />
<blockquote>“The [Jericho] march was centered around <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=joshua+6%3A+1-21&version=NRSV" target="_blank">Joshua 6</a> where God gives specific instructions on how the corrupt city of Jericho is to be conquered. <br />
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"But the Lord said to Joshua, 'See, I have handed Jericho over to you, with its king and the valiant warriors. And you shall march around the city, all the men of war circling the city once.'"</blockquote>
As another friend said in conversation about this, “it’s not as if Jesus shied away from pointing out people's guilt and/or shame when that was needed.” This is correct. “Peter do you love me?” “Is there anyone left to condemn you?” “May he who is without sin cast the first stone.” “The baptism of John - was it of man or of God?” “Zacchaeus, I'm staying at your house tonight.”<br />
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Coming to a place where truth and grace meet in the presence and work of the King means facing and naming our shame and guilt in the space of safety in the presence of the King who we come to trust not only desires us but cares for us. Jesus often purposefully facilitated his disciples facing and naming their shame and guilt BY connecting with them relationally. He does this with the intention of dignifying and edifying us RATHER THAN by exerting power over us (or Rome) in such a way as to cut off relationship with us and, well, "shaming" us (or Rome). In the love of Jesus, as my friend Matt Tebbe taught me: “The first truth we tell is about ourselves.” This is the Christian practice of confession. <br />
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<b>Going Away Astounded</b> <br />
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After the two parables of two sons and of the wicked tenants - in Matthew - the religious leaders continue to come and "call out" Jesus. They continue - <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2022&version=NRSV" target="_blank">in Matt. 22</a> - to come and “test” him. They continue to act on their desire to over-power him and put him in his place. He continues to point in the direction of their agency or empowerment and to an implicit invitation into relationship in the larger scheme of the history of Israel. They keep "going away astounded" (lol?). This continues until Jesus finally goes on the offensive with a recapitulation of the original thrust of the community he’s forming and shaping: that the story of our shared context centers on and is oriented around him. I’m speaking here of<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+22%3A+41-46&version=NRSV" target="_blank"> Matt 22: 41-46</a>, on the "question of David's son.” <br />
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THEN, in <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+23&version=NRSV" target="_blank">Matt. 23</a>, he goes into something that very easily LOOKS LIKE antagonistic "calling out" of the religious leaders. But, it says he's talking "to the crowds and to his disciples." He's not even talking to the religious leaders at this point. How could he be “giving them the business” if he’s not even talking to them? So, if he’s not “calling out” the religious leaders with a long series of “woes to” them, then what IS he doing? <br />
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What he is doing is actively engaging in teaching of the crowds and disciples - those who had gathered around himself in invitation and care - what it means and looks like to follow him. Doesn't look like seeking out the places of honor, doesn't look like converting seekers into death dealing ways, doesn't look like making arbitrary and random oaths that render your word meaningless, are self-indulgent in the value they place on the things that are about you and what you have power in or over, and don't honor God with wondrous awe, etc. Speaking of agency and empowerment, woe if you take that path! <br />
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All of this implies that (even) the central actor of the story is placing himself INSIDE it. My friend Glenn Runnalls often says, in reference to <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+corinthians+13&version=NRSV" target="_blank">1 Cor. 13: 8-13</a>, “A 1 Corinthians kind of loving requires a first Corinthians kind of knowing.” This speaks to the question of totalizing schemes - of my wanting my story to be THE story, everyone’s story. Even Jesus wasn’t seeking to win the war of the antagonisms of his day by making his story THE story. I mean this in the sense that Jesus wasn’t standing above and over his context. Instead, he Incarnationally situates himself inside it and, in sharing our context of warring antagonisms with us, also shares with us his Way of life and love. <br />
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Hearing this in the space of the text, I “go away astounded.” My “astounding” is accompanied by a desire to put this training into practice, to engage in a fuller love where grace and truth are bound to one another in the embodied person of Jesus, who shares himself abundantly with us. This is repentance. <br />
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Please don’t imagine that this “fullness” of love is limited to the territory of politics. A female Catholic friend just shared with me this weekend how there is antagonism in her relationship with her apparently agnostic or Deist boyfriend around questions of religion. This summer, another friend shared with me that she had found herself speaking harsh truth to someone who she thought was "in a cult." After reflecting on that experience and hearing the scriptures invite into a different kind of love, she was wondering how to relate to someone in such a situation without being harsh or offensive. In what other territory of your life, where antogonisms and pretentiousness otherwise reign, might Jesus be whispering into or reaching out and touching your soul with this sharing of the love embodied in the whole of power and grace of his person?
Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-30771180824436540462020-12-06T19:27:00.021-08:002020-12-09T03:34:06.599-08:00The Revolution Of The Intimate<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir00T8Y-Z5TVXn2ma-TLphSHAzNvMmMEpJkGbZuP98epfMPfkPqOjifgp2H5WwaIpaV4L6R_aL2rIcc_hWwCAc2njHDreY9wo33TNz4K9U-kwQF-xV0bigjVAYAFbsjAbqq4ei-g/s500/Ascension-of-Jesus-Christ-Rom-Neamt-Monastery.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="333" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir00T8Y-Z5TVXn2ma-TLphSHAzNvMmMEpJkGbZuP98epfMPfkPqOjifgp2H5WwaIpaV4L6R_aL2rIcc_hWwCAc2njHDreY9wo33TNz4K9U-kwQF-xV0bigjVAYAFbsjAbqq4ei-g/s400/Ascension-of-Jesus-Christ-Rom-Neamt-Monastery.jpg"/></a></div>
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I used to think I had to entertain reconciliation to our popular imagination for how “everyone will see” the Second Coming. In recently previous generations, the popular belief was that “everyone will see” (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=revelation+1%3A+7&version=NRSV" target="_blank">Rev. 1: 7</a>, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+40%3A+1-11&version=NRSV" target="_blank">Isaiah 40: 1-11</a>) on television in some grand event displayed on the News, or something, when Jesus returns. “Ha we told you!” Christians everywhere will shout while a confused news caster tries to narrate what they can’t understand and what challenges their heathen atheism. I was recently asked how I think God will make it so everyone on the globe sees Him returning all at once together. <br />
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In the last few years, I have been touched by desire for intimacy and care. I was previously less aware of these desires. It’s not that I was previously blissfully unaware, and nor that I “suppressed” them. In fact, if anything, my habit was more frequently to futilely indulge them without naming or owning them for what they were. And, at times, that indulgence, or any number of other pursuits or ways of interpreting the world, actually served as a distraction from or covering over of despair in alienation and death. <br />
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Besides an ongoing process of healing from what I semi-recently (in the last year and a half) learned was trauma, part of what awoke me to the embrace and touch of these true desires was the desire and touch of, for, and from a beautiful woman (don’t let your imagination go wild here, because that’s not even how it was, lol). As David Bentley Hart has said: "Beauty evokes desire. It precedes and elicits desire, it supplicates and commands it, and it gives shape to the soul that receives it." <br />
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As I got honest with myself and faced, named, and owned these desires, I also found myself in a place of uncertainty of whether or not I would ever enter the territory with this beautiful woman where such intimacy and care reign. In the midst of that uncertainty, I entertained what I only later learned was the lie that obtaining intimacy, care, and faithfulness, that entering that territory depends on my doing, saying, and being everything perfectly. The lie also included the sub-lie that the threat of the harsh desert territory of alienation and death hangs over me always as the harsh, punishing judgment for not doing everything right to obtain wholeness and belonging. <br />
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My entertainment of this set of lies naturally, at times, looked like extreme anxiety and fear, and like my WAY over-extending myself to do everything in my power I knew to do in order to close the gap of possibility and uncertainty around to actuality and knowing. This is an over-simplification, as there was a lot of other stuff going on, too, but it's also not an untruth. <br />
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My being given to see that I had been, unbeknownst to me, functioning on a lie was, at one and the same time, also the gift of seeing that entering a territory where intimacy, care, and faithfulness reign means and requires entrusting myself to the reign of just such a territory, rather than and as opposed to finding my way there by my own exhausting power. I died and found my life outside myself. <br />
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This means opening and entrusting myself into the reign of that territory as I take each small step in front of me of my actually being, my own enacting and embodying the faithfulness, intimacy, and care I now see I want - in relation to others. This means and implies that I can’t possibly see the far-reaching extent of the reign of the territory of my desire. I do not and cannot grasp them and wield them with my own power in a territory whose boundaries I set and therefore grasp. They do not belong to me. Rather, I come under them as I entrust myself to them, one step at a time along a journey whose end is always unknown. <br />
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It was just this week when the potency of the lie of my own power was opened to me, along with the greater power of the truth into which we entrust ourselves. That Truth is a person. Saturday, I “led” a discipleship cohort in training to enter this reign of the territory of faithfulness, care, and intimacy that we are tasked by the Truth to walk in and witness to. At least three people shed tears in our gathering, and that’s not the first time something like that has happened. Just afterwards, I got this email, which has an unstated message: “I was part of a group in NC back in the 90s with some really great people. I thought I wouldn’t find that again. This group is clearly that and this group is being one of the best examples of the church. I’m thankful for all of you.” That email brought tears of joy.<br />
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This was a parable, as much for myself as for anyone else, to say that the kingdom of God isn’t “seen” in the ease and power of grand spectacles. Let the reader understand. See <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matt.+24%3A+23-28&version=NRSV" target="_blank">Matt. 24: 23-28</a>. The point of the Parable of the Mustard Seed, btw, is that a mustard tree, relatively speaking, isn’t a big, tall, tree with a predominant central trunk standing over everything in the middle of a field. It instead stays closer to the ground with many branches and crawls across a large territory. <br />
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Jesus isn’t seen in the power of a grand spectacle any more than is the intimacy and desire in a relationship between a man and a woman. And, spectacles of worship don’t replace discipleship any more than our predominant concentration of all intimacy into the idol of the nuclear family replaces worship of Yahweh. <br />
<blockquote>“Witness…is already in conflict with nationalist desire, and against the fantasy of any people for global influence of world domination. The disciples will be formed by the Spirit as witnesses. They will be turned out to the world not as representatives of empires but those who will announce a revolution, <i>the revolution of the intimate</i>, God calling to the world. They will enter new places to become new people by joining themselves to those in Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. As Jesus announces this divine desire, he ascends. The ascension of Jesus continues to play so small a role in ecclesial imagination precisely because we struggle to think spatially… <br />
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We more easily imagine the time of Jesus Christ, the time in which he wishes to announce his reign…than we do the space of Jesus Christ, the space he wishes to inhabit and to enter in. If the ascended Lord embraces our time as his time to be made known, then he also seeks to walk in the places of this world to announce his life as the life given for the world. It is true that the ascension of Jesus certainly marks the new time of his reign and the time of the Spirit. In this time what will be constituted is the moment of gathering that will become the church. Yes, as Jan Milic Lochman noted, Jesus' ‘journey to heaven’ becomes the disciples’ ‘journey to the ends of the earth.’ Jesus ascends not only to establish presence through absence, but he also draws his body into the real journeys of his disciples into the world. He goes to heaven for us, ahead of us. He goes with and ahead of his disciples into the real places of this world… <br />
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His ascension marks less his power and more his scope. He will reign over the whole cosmos and yet he rises to raise us into heaven [i.e. – into a territory of glory or authority in the Spirit], as John Calvin said, and to overcome the distance between us and God and between one another. Jesus’ ascension is in fact God claiming our space as the sites for visitation, announcing God’s desire to come to us. God’s desire will be seen in the pouring out of the Spirit in a specific place [Jerusalem] in order to enter specific places and specific lives. He ascends for our sake, not to turn away from us but to more intensely focus on us. <br />
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As he ascends, the disciples watch, and here the danger of watching becomes clear. Jesus is no action figure, no superhero to be consumed in spectacle. Watching Jesus and watching for Jesus was and is a significant temptation for his disciples. Such watching can easily undermine movement and easily undermine the priority of the journey. Luke presents to us two men in white robes standing by the disciples, just as they did at the tomb of Jesus (Luke 24: 4-5). These men echo a similar question to the one asked in the Luke passage, a question that basically means, Why are you performing actions that contradict the actions of Jesus? The women (in Luke) sought the living among the dead; these other disciples at this moment look into the heavens concerned with absence rather than looking forward to presence…This is a moment of loss, even as they know that they must go forward in faith. We must never discount that the next step must be taken at the sight of Jesus’ leaving. Such a step is understandably a labored step, unsure and unclear. Nevertheless it must be taken because faith always leans forward to Jerusalem, toward that place where God waits to meet us. We are always drawn by God to our future.” <br />
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- Willie Jennings, Commentary on Acts, pp. 18-21
</blockquote>Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-69911559326654787142020-11-30T22:40:00.019-08:002020-12-01T11:35:04.312-08:00The Inevitable Necessity of Christ's Death Wasn't "Required""The idea that a God of love ever required a sacrifice to forgive His creation is a false one." - some guy named Barry Smith on Facebook.<br />
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I associate "required" with "necessity." I think if Christians associated necessity with "that which is inevitable" rather than with "should" and "ought" and "must," then a whole lot of other things would change, too. For the better. To that point, <a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/necessity?fbclid=IwAR1RA1pZKE8wr3XsvgkmOjAkSe_1VhUn6GADrcbAjJeqOYHlN9gzTvm6v7Q" target="_blank">seen here is</a> a screenshot from an online etymology dictionary:<br />
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I'm thinking of when my architecture professor used to semi-regularly say, "Necessity means death, that which is inevitable."
Of course, to consider that in terms of a question of soteriology - i.e. when considering the statement, "It is a lie that a God of love requires sacrifice" - is to have at least two constructs in the background that so predominantly shape our paradigmatic interpretive lens for the world and our selves as to generally be taken for granted:<br />
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1. a metaphysical or spiritual transaction that occurs at the cross when we mentally assent to the "truth" of it, in which we go from rejected to accepted, and <br />
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2. universal rules for right conduct imposed at a distance from a transcendent position above, which we are obligated to follow and which rightfully serve as the basis for a properly ordered legal system of what ought or should be the moral standard of human action (i.e. Kantian ethics, which depend on a Kantian metaphysical construct of reality and a Kantian anthropology of the 'transcendent subject'; i.e., we're talking about "legalism").<br />
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When we put the two constructs together, we can say that our predominant way of functioning assumes that Christian spirituality is basically assumed to be oriented around God's "grace" for us in light of our having broken His "rules." "Grace" here is conceived, or at least imagined, almost exclusively as getting treated differently from what we deserve, i.e. being accepted or forgiven for the breaking of God's rules. Of course, being God's, the "rules" are a "just" set of them, and one of them is that a sacrificial offering is "required" as an offering to appease Him in order to obtain His "forgiveness" and thus (re)acquire right standing with Him. The blood of the sacrifice here is conceived as a symbol of the death that is "required" or "necessary" for the appeasing.<br />
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HOWEVER, in the background of my imagining "necessity" as "that which is inevitable" is INSTEAD a conception of "grace" that isn't first, and thus much less exclusively, "being treated better than we deserve." Grace IS, however, first and primarily God's desire for relationship with us, God's desire for relational connection (he "came" in the fullness of grace and truth - John 1: 14). Here, God's desire for us is an overflow and outflow of mutual divine desire for and of relationship within the Trinity itself. "Personal relationship" isn't here diametrically opposed to the binding "obligation" to communal relationship, because they are essentially one and the same.<br />
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So, when the God who is Life reaches out for and in loving relationship with a people who are bent towards death, and when part of what this means is God's showing us that His love is non-coercive and non-violent and instead is simply the overwhelming of death and destruction in His very person that He shares with us through the Spirit out and because of His divine desire for us, then the death of the God who is revealed, in said death, to be the God of Resurrection Life, is seen and revealed to be just as inevitable as the death of the humans who kill him in the sin that is the "animating" principle of their death (if we can call the principle of death "animating"). I.e., "Necessity means death, that which is inevitable."<br />
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The blood of the sacrifice here is conceived, instead of as a symbol of the death that is "required" or "necessary," the very life-blood of the animal, in and by which we share in the divine desire for His life that is characterized by Love that takes a certain and particular shape at the cross (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Phil.+2%3A1-11&version=NRSV" target="_blank">Phil. 2:1-11</a>). The "blood" here is thus a sign of the work and action of the Spirit's actually and functionally sharing God's life with us, i.e. the Life of "grace" in discipleship 🙂 <br />
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Noticeably, here:<br />
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1. There is no "metaphysical transaction." There is simply a person who dies, lives, and will come again.<br />
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2. There are no "rules" "from above." The "rule" is "established" in the life and death of the person we see revealing to us our own very life and death. God isn't a legalist, because God is a person.<br />
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Also, noticeably, then, "sin" here is obviously taken very seriously. Just not in the same way as in our popular Christian imagination that is shaped by the above two constructs that I laid out.<br />
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I should also, of course, then note that an additional image that "overflows" from this different conception of the grace of God is that, if you look at the etymology of "necessity" - "condition of being in need, want of the means of living" - it helps us in our imagination to tie this "inevitability" of God's death to the vulnerability of Jesus as he reaches out for and towards relationship with us - imaged in his nakedness before us at his birth, his baptism, and his death.<br />
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This, in turn, means that - seeing as how we're talking about "necessity" in the first place and thus also about our "needs," i.e. about our economy - our desires for economic security are also our desires for life itself and are a sharing in God's desire for life with us, in the face of our death that is, in our sin that disorders our economic desires, inevitable. I.e., our desire for economic security is a response to the threat of death that is overcome in the life of God that He shares with us in the person of Christ through the Spirit (foreshadowed in the typology of Isaac and the ram).<br />
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For my Catholic (and perhaps Reformed or Lutheran "Two Kingdom"?) friends, one implication here is thus that the bifurcation of the ordered ends of the church towards spiritual salvation ending in life in heaven, as compared to the ordered end of the State towards the meeting of human "needs" on earth, is apparently a false one (btw the early church Fathers, on whom this interpretation I'm articulating of the person and life of Christ relies, generally lived and taught before the predominance of the Constaninism that "necessitated" and makes sense of the bifurcation in question of the ordered ends of church and State). Both "ends" are ordered by and in that which is "inevitable" by and in the person of Christ's shared life with us. Is that "inevitability" in Christ our life or our death? The "needs" that are met by the State in the reigning bifurcation are articulated, are written, into the very death of the Word. The story of God's resurrection thus tells us that those needs are actually met in the non-bifurcated person of Christ, shared with us by the divine desire of grace in, by, and through the Spirit. In other words, the missio dei can't be birucated into earthly and heavently ends.<br />
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Tying this unity of the person of Christ to the story of our very life and death also, of course, ties the "sin offerings" of the O.T. to their entire economic system. Which, of course, ties the Resurrection Life of Jesus to ours (does "ours" here refer to our economic system or to our life and death? 😃 ) 🙂 <br />
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<i>My being cleaves to the dust.<br />
Give me life as befits Your word.</i><br />
- Psalm 119: 25Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-23534605548838527112020-11-15T15:38:00.031-08:002020-11-17T20:50:59.516-08:00Modern Nobility Means Traumatic Detachment<blockquote><i>Often twice and sometimes three times a week the two of them came to town and into the house - the foolish unreal voluble preserved woman now six years absent from the world - the woman who had quitted home and kin on a flood of tears and in a shadowy miasmic region something like the bitter purlieus of Styx and produced two children and then rose like the swamp-hatched butterfly, unimpeded by weight of stomach and all the heavy organs of suffering and experience, into a perennial bright vacuum of arrested sun - and the young girl dreaming, not living, in her complete detachment and imperviousness to actuality almost like physical deafness. </i>
- from Absalom, Absalom, by William Faulkner</blockquote>
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Modern nobility means traumatic detachment. I say this as I reflect on my own noble aspirations that have shaped my life as a Southern white male here in Virginia. Witness James Madison's Montpelier. <br />
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Take this. Don't keep it at a distance. And eat. Let it become part of your body. Drink it into your lifeblood. Don't look at it as a beautiful spectacle, frozen in the historical past. <br />
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When you "take it and eat," how does it settle there? What do you feel and sense in your body? When you "drink it in," how do you see it shaping your identity, your desires, and the trajectory of your life?<br />
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Once, when I was visiting a farmer friend in the rural outskirts of Charlottesville, I went with him to deliver hay to a friend of his, whose property came up against a back gate of the Montpelier estate. I took in a sense of enticing mystery and honor, connection to the lore of our land and to one of its heroes. I "drank in" an aspiration to a nobility and dignity. In it, I sensed a calling to something higher. <br />
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Many years later, others have called, beckoned, and pointed me to parts of this estate, so to speak, that aren't included in this photograph. What I didn't see or take note of, what I didn't tend to when finding myself in close proximity to this shaping of elements of the earth in particular ways that are ordered to particular ends and to a particular vision for life (i.e. the Architecture), was the slave quarters and the shackles. This makes sense, because they're purposefully not included in the photograph. They aren't what we look to when we tend to either Montpelier or to our own lives. I look elsewhere. <br />
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The problem with this is that my entire vision was ordered in a particular direction, while what built and enabled what I was seeking after was something to which I was utterly blind. And history always carries forward into the present. I'm still shaped by this image of nobility and dignity built on the backs of those who are not accounted for as noble and dignified elements of the Architecture of our society. <br />
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As I've begun to tend to these desires and aspirations "within myself" to a nobility and dignity shaped in the particular ways that this photograph represents to and for us, I have begun to notice them at work in unexpected and surprising ways. For example, when I want to be, I'm pretty good at "argument," at critique, or "criticism." On my good days, I can exercise this muscle by making a point very effectively and clearly. On my bad days, if I'm honest, I'm good at making someone look like an idiot if I want to, or if I suddenly deem them worthy of that kind of treatment. Can you see how that's not unrelated to the hidden socio-political and economic dynamics embedded in this photograph? Who am I to judge that? Who died and made me master over them? <br />
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Related, I spent much of my life proud of how I was able to "think for myself," that I wasn't someone who just took things for granted as they were given to me by others. I didn't just "take in" what others handed me, you see. On resumes, this gets named "critical thinking skills." In popular culture and in current political antagonisms, it drives conspiracy theories (yes, I'm saying I can identify with the urge behind conspiracy theories). I recognize "within myself" this noble aspiration to "rise above the fray," to be able to control my own narrative for the world, to "see over" things in ways that others supposedly can't - or at least perhaps don't. I sense "in my belly" a primal desire for dignity disordered towards an image of myself as Master of the universe. Modern nobility means traumatic detachment.<br />
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If this wasn't so common, I probably wouldn't bother confessing it on Facebook or on my blog. I also probably wouldn't bother if it wasn't so easy to trace these aspirations I've taken into myself right through the honorable and noble desires of Southern Nationalist Plantation Theology - into which Trump has tapped. What I'm suggesting is that it is rather easy to connect the dots between the Classical Liberalism at the heart of conservative ideology and the unaccounted for and inevitable tensions born of our own racism at the heart of Southern culture, of Southern honor and shame relational dynamics, and of the individualism with which we identify and by which find ourselves in our theology that historically ran right through plantations just like this one. <br />
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How many times have you heard James Madison lifted up as evidence of the "Christianity" of our Founding Fathers and, thus, of the manifest destiny of America as a Christian Nation, a City on a Hill, a "light to the nations"? This can begin to sound a lot like it taps into my aspiration to a place "above the fray," can't it? <br />
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In the same way that slavery disappears from this photograph, our anti-Christian urge born of Enlightenment Revolutionary spirit to rise "above the fray" and, for example, "think for ourselves," or to be a "free thinker," or even to be consumed with fears and worries of whether or not I AS AN INDIVIDUAL "am saved," covers over the Supremacy at the heart of what animates the unaccounted for racial tensions in our history and our present, tensions Jesus himself calls us to heal and reconcile but which we instead choose to cover over with ideological narratives of individual Mastery over our own universe. I would say "me" rather than "we," but what I'm saying I'm seeing "within" myself, what I'm telling you I've "taken in," has too much explanatory power of our history and our present for me to try to pretend not to see it elsewhere, as well.<br />
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Why are those of us most apt to think of ourselves as "independent" or "free" or "self governing" also most apt to scapegoat "the left" rather than to confess and repent of our desires that don't order our lives toward the shared life of communion to which we are beckoned by and in God? Why are so many of us not only willing but itching to fight valiantly to the death to save a "freedom" or a Mastery against all that we perceive to impose on it, as though we're either still fighting against the Union Army or have decided to join in said fight? I'm aggravated with "the right," and I STILL, in a sense, have a tendency within myself to want to do this. <br />
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Why are we still actively working towards and for that which segregates and divides rather than that which heals and restores? Why do we scapegoat and fear "the rioters and looters" (most of whom are actually at least relatively peaceful protesters) rather than seek to see justice and mercy roll down like waters? Why is Sunday still the most segregated day of the week? Why are there so few black people in the rural South? Why did "The Great Migration" of the 1920's to the '70's happen (<a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/great-migration" target="_blank">see link here</a>, if you aren't aware of what this is), followed and accompanied by White Flight (see links <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://www.history.com/news/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-benefits" target="_blank">here</a> if you're wondering what I mean by "White Flight")? Why do we walk right up to the front of the Master's House rather than following in the footsteps of Jesus down to the slave quarters? Why do we have such a hard time facing, naming and owning our racism? Why is it still unaccounted for? <br />
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I would suggest that, in this very moment, you are "taking and eating" and that you are "drinking" a representation of the answer to those questions - in ways that aren't as obvious and easy as the ones that we can point to safely and distantly in a frozen history of the past. This history of our covering over of the trauma of our racial tensions with a narrative of above the fray detachment is actually even built into the foundational history the Montpelier Estate itself. The original house on the property was called "Mount Pleasant," and its history included an apparent murder of the Master by three of his slaves, followed by deadly and torturous retribution by the legal authorities (<a href="http://theenchantedmanor.com/tag/james-madisons-home/?fbclid=IwAR2B2R8-C0Uqh3kKbT03O62tC1uFqcru8z2X3bwcpqj83_rWsEq6F2r4kqc" target="_blank">click here</a> if you would like to dig into a bit more detail on this). <br />
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Though murder is never the answer in God, we should not all too easily imagine that the Master was murdered becuase his slaves experienced his yolk as easy and his burden as light there on Mount Pleasant. This history carries forward into our present racial tensions and protests of police brutality. This history that never died and is our present is why our white middle class suburban houses here in Virginia look like Colonial Plantation Houses. It's also why the neighborhoods where the descendants of slaves are over-policed to keep them "in their place" and out of sight of our contmepory Master's quarters. <br />
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This kind of sader meal of the story of my time and place came to me as I reflected on how basically all of the social, character, and narrative dynamics of Absalom, Absalom hinge, unnamed, around slavery. Of course, this wouldn't mean much if Absalom, Absalom, centering around the building and life of a Southern Plantation in Mississippi, wasn't about us, our world, our land, and our story. <br />
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Modern nobility means traumatic detachment. I say this as I reflect on my own noble aspirations that have shaped my life as a Southern white male here in Virginia. As the people of God, how are we called and invited to respond to these conditions?<br />Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-26403550193670876282020-11-08T04:00:00.001-08:002020-11-08T08:16:22.861-08:00Dear White Friends: Election Week Is Over, Now What? <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2Vz5JyQbaV1cD62wU5WJ2wi9XxwdfzLlCoBQc6kxX84Jur0djlNaJ31vPRW_vetEEg889ahnx0uMTxSBBpWJUkt1TzaVPT0Vft_sgfBBuiDCT2obcO9pzIUFq5bqGeVGJHg7ORQ/s1024/08+Antietam.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="978" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2Vz5JyQbaV1cD62wU5WJ2wi9XxwdfzLlCoBQc6kxX84Jur0djlNaJ31vPRW_vetEEg889ahnx0uMTxSBBpWJUkt1TzaVPT0Vft_sgfBBuiDCT2obcO9pzIUFq5bqGeVGJHg7ORQ/s400/08+Antietam.jpg"/></a></div>
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, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, <b>ELECTS</b> - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day.html" target="_blank">see my reflection on Day 1</a>, Sunday. <br />
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Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23. <br />
“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, <i>if I consider my own place</i> 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? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance? <br />
<br />
It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results. If you would like to go back and engage with my previous reflections on Matthew, you can click on the following links: Monday, <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day_2.html" target="_blank">Day 2</a>, Tuesday, <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day_3.html" target="_blank">Day 3</a>, Wednesday, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-friends-its-election-week.html" target="_blank">Day 4</a>, Thursday, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-friends-its-election-week_5.html" target="_blank">Day 5</a>, <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-friends-its-election-week_6.html" target="_blank">Friday</a> Day 6, and <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-friends-its-election-week_7.html" target="_blank">Saturday</a> Day 7. <br />
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***<br />
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Sunday, Day 1 of a New Week: <br />
<blockquote>“Amen I tell you, all these things will come upon this generation. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who have been sent to you, how often I have wished to gather your children, the way a bird gathers her chicks under her wings, and you did not wish it. See: For you, your house is abandoned to desolation. For I tell you, henceforth, you most assuredly will not see me until you say, ‘Blessed is he who come in the name of the Lord’.” – Matthew 23: 36-39</blockquote>
How will we escape the destiny of our path towards abandonment to desolation, utter useless to God, total rot and fruitlessness before the Anointed? Can we enter into His election for us, into His desire and beckoning into shared life with those who are not like us in ways we would otherwise, without the reign and royal sending of the Spirit and thus without a conversion of our very desires, never do? <br />
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What does our waiting for the Son of Man who comes in the name of the Lord to take his throne look like? What does that tell us about what awaits us when what we think we hope for actually comes to fruition? <br />
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Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner. <br />
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*Pictured here: Dead Confederate soldiers in the sunken road after the Battle of Antietam, Alexander Gardner, September 1862. Courtesy of the Library of Congress<br />
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"The past is never dead. It's not even past." - William Faulkner <br />Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-24034936525171539022020-11-07T04:00:00.000-08:002020-11-07T04:15:21.777-08:00Dear White Friends: It’s Election Week, Day 7<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj71UTlwDfgYHgzkdCDqIiYRk3jMJiPn0psu8vATXDZVVE72GnvOdyjIQp4nhElsz-za5JJRHV4f8GlF6EEeJlxRti-2N0qkB9x0M6k3ZTZkJvJnj-7qeXv7GVzMSoAsqDDSjsM_g/s620/07+MLK.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="416" data-original-width="620" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj71UTlwDfgYHgzkdCDqIiYRk3jMJiPn0psu8vATXDZVVE72GnvOdyjIQp4nhElsz-za5JJRHV4f8GlF6EEeJlxRti-2N0qkB9x0M6k3ZTZkJvJnj-7qeXv7GVzMSoAsqDDSjsM_g/s400/07+MLK.jpg"/></a></div>
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, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, <b>ELECTS</b> - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day.html" target="_blank">see my reflection on Day 1</a>, Sunday. <br />
<br />
Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23. <br />
“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, <i>if I consider my own place</i> 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? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance? <br />
<br />
It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results. If you would like to go back and engage with my previous reflections on Matthew, you can click on the following links: Monday, <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day_2.html" target="_blank">Day 2</a>, Tuesday, <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day_3.html" target="_blank">Day 3</a>, Wednesday, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-friends-its-election-week.html" target="_blank">Day 4</a>, Thursday, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-friends-its-election-week_5.html" target="_blank">Day 5</a>, and <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-friends-its-election-week_6.html" target="_blank">Friday</a> Day 6. <br />
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***<br />
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Saturday, Day 7:<br />
<blockquote>“Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, charlatans, because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the upright, And say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers,’ we should not have had a part with them in the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you bear witness regarding yourselves that you are the sons of the prophets’ murderers. And you – you fully measure up to your fathers. Serpents, brood of vipers, how may you escape the verdict of Hinnom’s Vale? So look: I send prophets and wise men and scribes to you; some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will flog in your synagogues and drive from city to city; Thus accrues to you all the righteous blood shed on the earth…” – Matt. 23: 29-35 </blockquote>
I have said in my heart: “Why are they beating Rodney King, and why is it cause for such social unrest, such violence? Surely he did something for them to beat and punish him that way! Law and order must be maintained!” <br />
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I have said in my heart: “But OJ did it! This is an injustice and a travesty! Why are they jumping and screaming and hugging and crying tears of joy! This isn’t right! Law and order must be maintained!” <br />
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I have said in my heart, “Racism should not and does not need to be discussed in church. Church is about the salvation of souls. This makes me uncomfortable.” <br />
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I have said in my heart, “Do not remove and destroy our history and our monuments. We should honor the history of our fathers. Those violent extremists are destroying our freedom and our way of life!” <br />
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Thus I bear witness regarding myself that I am the son of the prophets’ murderers. And I – I fully measure up to my fathers. Serpent, brood of vipers I belong to, how may I escape the verdict of Hinnom’s Vale? <br />
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We quote the prophet Martin Luther King as though we love him, but we turn our backs on his invitation into shared life with him. We kill him, and then we praise him (when he was murdered, he was one of the most hated men in America). We praise him, and we conveniently gloss over those particular words of his that challenge our ways of life. I am so blind to this that, when black people point it out to me, I genuinely don’t know what parts of MLKs teachings to which they’re referring. At other times, I have perhaps known but, in my pretense, dressed myself up in an honorable “righteousness of God” while, in my heart, arbitrarily proclaiming the prophet a dangerous Marxist (which, his being being non-violent, was obviously my partaking in an arbitrary system of meaning in accordance with my own desired socio-political ends). <br />
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Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.<br />
<br />
How will you escape the destiny of our path towards utter useless to God, towards total rot and fruitlessness before the Anointed? Can you enter into his election for you, into his desire and beckoning into shared life with those who are not like you in ways you would otherwise, without the reign and royal sending of the Spirit and without a corresponding conversion of desire, never do? <br />
Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-28069422238355000772020-11-06T19:09:00.004-08:002020-11-06T19:15:12.403-08:00TO GAIN THE GLOBE IS TO LOSE THE LAND<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlYnKY7iGzAiGcDrmtW_n_6LTwXD2_X6QfHHBFja2KRjRz2mfZeya6EATZD1L_L17OGswdK8a0XwzDuf9ENJfxHC8ibFCYJG7D9alR5DA-sSK-UG74lo3Xf9JfSGv4_vXIo5FhRQ/s2048/chicken+on+a+farm.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlYnKY7iGzAiGcDrmtW_n_6LTwXD2_X6QfHHBFja2KRjRz2mfZeya6EATZD1L_L17OGswdK8a0XwzDuf9ENJfxHC8ibFCYJG7D9alR5DA-sSK-UG74lo3Xf9JfSGv4_vXIo5FhRQ/s400/chicken+on+a+farm.jpg"/></a></div>
The prevailing story of America is one of freedom, equality, and “democracy.” Some, however, say that we cannot tell the story of America without telling a story of racism. White people tend to respond to this with utter offense. There is a divide here that appears irreconcilable. Election2020 seems to be confirming our division. How could so many white people still be voting for Trump after what we’ve seen for the last four years, right? <br />
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I saw someone say this today: “I don’t think it’s as simple as calling them all racists and religious zealots. There’s a fear or longing they have that we’ve got to be able to tap into somehow…” Black and minority voices legitimately remind us that it’s not rightly their burden to do that work. I think it is part of my work, though. After all, I needed a conversion of sorts myself to even begin to “see” the story of my own racism. So, I feel at least somewhat qualified to somehow try to “tap into” what’s going on. And, where will we be with no sense of mutual understanding? So...<br />
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I have a dear Catholic friend from rural Charlottesville. If there was ever someone who revealed the truth of “I don’t think it’s as simple as calling them all racists and religious zealots,” it would be him. He and I have been dear friends for 22 years, precisely because he’s “good people.” He’s not a hateful person. But he also legitimately thinks Trump isn’t racist. How is that possible? What world is he living in? If he were in your living room with an elephant, what could he be looking at, and in what direction, to not only not see the elephant but to look me directly in the face and tell me there’s no elephant? <br />
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Let me offer two anecdotal answers that will at first seem totally nonsensical and out of thin air: eggs, and the Eucharist. He’s passionate about both. He doesn’t eat eggs from the grocery store. He refuses. He only eats eggs laid by the chickens on his farm. And, he doesn’t flavor them with processed foods from the grocery store, either, such as cheese or salt. He savors the “natural” flavor of the eggs themselves. Connected to his love for the eggs laid by the chickens on the land on which he dwells, I believe or at least suspect, is his passion for the Eucharist. He got emotional last night telling me repeatedly essentially that the “ACTUAL body and blood” of Jesus in the Eucharist is the only way to salvation. He put great stress on the word “actual.” <br />
<br />
He sees the “World Economic Forum” and “The Great Reset”, progressivism and globalism as evil threats to healthy society that are and can only be explained and driven by Satan. At this point, it may be EVEN EASIER for victims of racial and patriarchal trauma everywhere to dismiss him as a racist misogynist, but please bear with me here, if you are able. <br />
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Let me suggest that this love for eggs and this aspiration to the “actual body and blood” of Jesus can stand as representatives of the positive, “good” hope or vision that could possibly drive people to “miss the elephant in the room” and vote for a man who, to the rest of us, is obviously dangerous. In eggs and Eucharist, I think we can see glimpses not of what they’re blind to but of what they see and want. And, perhaps it’s actually difficult – for anyone - to name (Neo-Thomists, don’t @ me). For all Trump voters, it won’t be represented in eggs and Eucharist. The specifics of the story will be different for many. For many, it might go by something like “connection to nature.” For others, it might be “the natural way” to bear children and family (minus contraceptives and abortion)? For all I know, it might be hiking for some people. <br />
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Out of this vision and hope for connection to and identification with the land and the earth comes a dread, a fear, an utter and total rejection of what is SENSED as its loss. To gain the globe is to lose the land. So, the further “globalism’s” territory spreads, the greater the rural Trump voter VISCERALLY senses dislocation from the land. And, this is difficult to name and articulate. I would even suggest that the Conservative’s rhetoric of “freedom” may “actually” ring most true for rural voters as a sense of binding to the beckoning of the land. <br />
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The kicker for me, then, is that the white rural Trump voters and those traumatized by their votes essentially share the same trauma. Those who dissociatively and aspirationally insist on narratives of freedom and equality are actually telling the same story as those who give witness to their own racial (and patriarchal) trauma. What do I mean by that? <br />
<blockquote>“Historically, this is so obvious as to seem trite, but…while almost imperceptible, [this displacement] was earth shattering…It will not be easy to articulate the material reality of displacement because it is the articulation of a loss from within the loss itself. To fully tell it requires the very thing that is lacking, indigenous voices telling their own stories of transformation through current concepts of space, identity, and land. Equally difficult is the attempt to peer into a theological mistake so wide, so comprehensive that it has disappeared, having expanded to cover the horizon of modernity itself...Vilgnano [a 16th century Portuguese Jesuit priest on a mission to spread Christianity to Japan] entered this moment of dislocation by choice, the slave by force.…That new space…meant utter disruption for the African. Gone was the earth, the ground, spaces and places that facilitated his identity…” – Willie Jennings, pp. 37-39, The Christian Imagination: Theology And The Origins of Race</blockquote>
One entered by choice, the other by force, but both DID enter “this moment of dislocation.” And, it was and remains traumatic for both. All trauma leaves us aspiring to health and healing. “Gone was the earth, the ground…” This is, perhaps, the rural voter’s visceral fear of the “progression” of globalism. This shared trauma may also thus even partly explain why the contours of "socialism" or "communism" become so nebulous in the linguistic world and practices of conservatives? <br />
Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-10923392903807778102020-11-06T05:10:00.001-08:002020-11-06T05:11:09.608-08:00Dear White Friends: It’s Election Week, Day 6<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtSunAXya_jVWzLEnu8QmDqTF-eGMHYlJxnDb5kEW8zj5mSvAJbJ8Gip34ycDoyaqJIcatic7Q6FCJSKyTvCwnkCmICFWQJOmtVwM4fAHEBnCVmOB7DBx3A9YIKRKfhY45m9PkDg/s828/06+American+Psycho.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="552" data-original-width="828" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtSunAXya_jVWzLEnu8QmDqTF-eGMHYlJxnDb5kEW8zj5mSvAJbJ8Gip34ycDoyaqJIcatic7Q6FCJSKyTvCwnkCmICFWQJOmtVwM4fAHEBnCVmOB7DBx3A9YIKRKfhY45m9PkDg/s400/06+American+Psycho.jpg"/></a></div>
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, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, <b>ELECTS</b> - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day.html" target="_blank">see my reflection on Day 1</a>, Sunday. <br />
<br />
Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23. <br />
“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, <i>if I consider my own place</i> 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? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance? <br />
<br />
It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results. If you would like to go back and engage with my previous reflections on Matthew, you can click on the following links: Monday, <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day_2.html" target="_blank">Day 2</a>, Tuesday, <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day_3.html" target="_blank">Day 3</a>, Wednesday, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-friends-its-election-week.html" target="_blank">Day 4</a>, Thursday, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-friends-its-election-week_5.html" target="_blank">Day 5</a>. <br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Friday, Day 6: <br />
<blockquote>“You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are filled up with plunder and dissoluteness. Blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup, so that its outside may also be clean. Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, charlatans, because you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly indeed appear lovely, but within are filled with the bones of the dead and with all uncleanliness. Thus you also outwardly indeed appear upright, but you are full of dissimulation and lawlessness.”- Matthew 23: 25-28</blockquote>
I noted in my reflection on Day 5 that, like the Pharisee, I repeatedly staked my life on an arbitrary system of meaning I constructed in order to place myself in a particular place on our late consumer capitalist social ladder (see Matt. 23: 16-24), until Jesus confronted me with my shame and my pride, my failures and my desires, and I more readily was formed into a desire to follow Jesus into the posture of “servant” (see Matt 23: 11-12). I told the story of how I was confronted by and challenged with this idolatry of mine when I lost my jobs as “an Architect” and as “a Nurse.” I now usually say, “I work as in hospice nursing” rather than “I am a hospice nurse.” <br />
<br />
What I have not shared is the extent and depth of what was reveled “inside the cup” when I saw the idols of my own identity I had constructed shattering and falling apart before me. I am using David Bentley Hart’s translation, so I characteristically had to look up “dissoluteness” and “dissimulation” in the dictionary. The NRSV uses “self-indulgence” and “hypocrisy”, respectively. I almost replaced DBH’s terms with the NRSV’s, simply for the sake of simplicity and clarity. But, DBH’s words name and follow the contours of the depths and extent of my darkness with much stronger texture and more vibrant color.<br />
<br />
A quick google search, and I came up with this: <br />
<blockquote>“The adjective dissolute means unrestrained. If you're a dissolute person, you indulge in gambling, drugs, and drinking and don't care if others disapprove. If your mother tells you you're dissolute, she's not trying to be kind. – from <a href="https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/dissolute#:~:text=The%20adjective%20dissolute%20means%20unrestrained,not%20trying%20to%20be%20kind." target="_blank">here</a>. <br />
<br />
marked by indulgence in things (such as drink or promiscuous sex) deemed vices…leading a dissolute lifestyle; the dissolute and degrading aspects of human nature. – from <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dissolute" target="_blank">here</a>. </blockquote>
When I was living into my constructed monument to my own glory and individual talent as “an Architect,” the underbelly of my empty and vain grasping at wind was evident in the fact that I spent hours of my daily life consumed by sexual compulsions that took various forms, including but not limited to: strip clubs leading to thousands of dollars of debt, hours upon hours of pornography, and online social games that made space for overt and insubstantial flirting that required nothing of my full personhood and that didn’t call me into a shared life of covenant love or of divine joining with other persons who are not like me and thus who reveal myself to me. <br />
<br />
“Self indulgence” may accurately describe that, but I suspect it doesn’t as fully do justice to what was “inside my cup” the way “dissoluteness” does. I partly hear in this judgment Jesus’ telling the scribes and Pharisees that their hard-heartedness, uncaring and unloving hearts was what drove their arbitrary rules requiring a contract for divorce so that they could ever-so-easily lust after whoever else they wanted instead, thus not caring that they were leaving their wives to a hopelessly shameful life of either begging or prostitution (see the woman at the well). In this relational engagement with Jesus, I am the Pharisee. In this sense, I identify with Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho,” pictured here. <br />
<br />
My quick google search of “dissimulation” yielded “concealment of one's thoughts, feelings, or character; pretense.” “Hypocrisy” might accurately describe that, but our post-Enlightenment presumptions of “authenticity” tend to miss-shape the color of that term in ways that avoid what Jesus was specifically naming. Where “hypocrisy” might make us imagine Jesus was talking about being “two faced,” or perhaps “putting on a performance” and “not being their true selves” due to their “insecurities,” Jesus <i>was more specifically confronting them with and exposing</i> the ways they didn’t care about or love the people with whom God called and invited them to share life of divine joining, while they pretended to posture and position themselves as honorable leaders of those very people. <br />
<br />
I have already told my story of how I sought to climb my way up the ladder and didn’t care who I left behind (see Matt. 23: 13). What I didn’t share is that the life and identity of my American consumer Christianity, like the Nationalistic Jewish life and identity of the scribes and Pharisees, shaped and formed me to, as a white person, <i>like and enjoy</i> being socially “centered,” and – even if I “helped them” from a distance - I <i>didn’t care about</i> others on the margins. All the while, I postured and presented myself as an honorable member who fit well within our sick social fabric. I identify with Patrick Bateman on this count, too. <br />
<blockquote>"I've always been struck in America by an emotional poverty so bottomless and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable or organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct and on black white relations. If Americans were not so terrified of their private self, they would never have become so dependant on what they call the Negro problem. This 'problem,' which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters. And it is destroying them. And this, not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role of the guilty and constricted White imagination, as assigned to the blacks." - James Baldwin </blockquote>
I <i>liked and enjoyed</i> my life of safety and comfort in my middle class, suburban, white neighborhood, and I <i>didn’t care</i> that others on the margins were not safe, and that they spent their lives shaped and formed by the trauma of violence, whether violence from those in their own neighborhood or from police whose job was to enforce the segregated geography of our white supremacists social order that rules as a principality and power in all of our American cities. And, if I didn’t know about any of this, I didn’t care to. So, when black and brown people heard “law and order” as a militaristic threat, I didn’t blink or think twice. The phrase signaled safety, security, and comfort for me. Being a white male who had the safety and comfort we all desire but that all of us don’t have in our shared social space together that we arbitrarily impose controlled segregation over, I embraced my posture and position as an honorable and contributing part of our social fabric. In this relational engagement with Jesus, I am the Pharisee. <br />
<br />
I <i>liked and enjoyed</i>, even took for granted as expected, growing up with and having good health care. And, I <i>didn’t care that</i> others couldn’t get it and spent their lives in fear of being economically shattered by any potential medical emergency. . Being a white male who had the access to affordable health care we all desire but that all of us don’t have in our shared social space together, I embraced my posture and position as an honorable and contributing part of our social fabric. In this relational engagement with Jesus, <i>I am the Pharisee</i>. <br />
<br />
Because I was never in that situation, I am not sure if, bearing the fruit of my life of dissoluteness, I would have cared that a woman had gotten pregnant and been able to choose to get an abortion. Perhaps that would have beckoned me out of my blindness and compulsively disordered desires? But I know I didn’t care that black people couldn’t exactly choose not to be black – at least not without choosing to participate in and tyrannically give their allegiance to the principalities and powers constructed, legitimized, and enforced by White power. I mentioned this in my reflection on Day 3 (if interested, see link, above), on Matt 23: 13. <br />
<br />
“My inside” was “an unwashed cup.” I was “filled with the bones of the dead and with all uncleanliness.” In other words, I was not filled with love for and care towards those not like myself with whom I am called and beckoned – in other words, ELECTED – to a shared life together in Christ. The difference between the “inside” and “outside” was that of my “cup” or of the “whitewashing” of my tomb, yes. It was the difference between my true “impurity” and “uncleanliness” compared to my “pretense” to honor and position on our social ladder, yes. <br />
<br />
"The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story." - James Baldwin <br />
<br />
But these analogies of uncleanliness and death also describe, refer, or point to the deadly rot that governs and consumes us within our white, rich, suburban communities at large, compared to the pretense and whitewashing that so glaringly and obviously appears as such to black and brown people on the margins (if they aren’t instead shaped by desire to become like us). And, those on the margins of the life of Israel perceived this about the scribes and Pharisees, too. <br />
<blockquote>"You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves. And furthermore, you give me a terrifying advantage. You never had to look at me. I had to look at you. I know more about you than you know about me. Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed that isn't faced." - James Baldwin </blockquote>
Wherever you stand in relation to it – whether perhaps embracing it or being governed by your reaction against it - does your formation and discipleship into Nationalistic Christian consumerism, or into partisan politics, shape you into “self-indulgence” or “dissoluteness”? How do you see it training and making it easy for you to indulge the basest of your desires? Do you see it as a degradation of your humanity? Do or can you see the way our combative, culture war, American consumer Christian formation shapes us into desires to reach upward towards higher social and economic capital and thus towards “dissimulation” or “hypocrisy” in relation to those who are not like us? <br />
<br />
And, can you hear these questions as good news of freedom from such death and invitation into a care and love that constitutes our divine desire of beckoning, of ELECTION into shared life together in Christ among those who would otherwise have nothing to do with one another? <br />
Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-37215096502427254922020-11-05T04:50:00.001-08:002020-11-05T04:56:21.791-08:00Dear White Friends: It’s Election Week, Day 5<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi31gZ1acv_ZXEUZJwNbbIF8OpYLTW0BpnMBF_J3FLxZFgkQ5IDvEJ3D4AwJT07g1YXqYxycck1YqBEMBT-20VLbCB-jOw9Xw6CTO2sSrIEDS4rC-CzTBeIttVqYUsw7fr-8Ja06Q/s1174/05+St+Johns+Church.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi31gZ1acv_ZXEUZJwNbbIF8OpYLTW0BpnMBF_J3FLxZFgkQ5IDvEJ3D4AwJT07g1YXqYxycck1YqBEMBT-20VLbCB-jOw9Xw6CTO2sSrIEDS4rC-CzTBeIttVqYUsw7fr-8Ja06Q/s400/05+St+Johns+Church.png"/></a></div>
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, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, <b>ELECTS</b> - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day.html" target="_blank">see my reflection on Day 1</a>, Sunday. <br />
<br />
Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23. <br />
“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, <i>if I consider my own place</i> 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? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance? <br />
<br />
It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results. If you would like to go back and engage with my previous reflections on Matthew, you can click on the following links: Monday, <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day_2.html" target="_blank">Day 2</a>, Tuesday, <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day_3.html" target="_blank">Day 3</a>, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-friends-its-election-week.html" target="_blank">Wednesday</a>, Day 4. <br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Thursday, Day 5:<br />
<blockquote>“Alas, for you blind guides who say, ‘Whoever swears by the Temple sanctuary, it means nothing, but whoever swears by the gold of the Temple sanctuary, he is under obligation.’ Fools and blind men! For what is greater, the gold of the Temple sanctuary or the sanctuary that makes the gold holy?...the one who swears by the Temple sanctuary swears by the sanctuary and by him who dwells in it. And the one who swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it. Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, charlatans, because you tithe a tenth of the mint and the dill and the cumin, and have neglected the weightier things of the law, the judgment and the mercy and the faith; yet these things you ought to have done, while also not neglecting those others. Blind guides, who strain out the gnat but drink down the camel.” – Matthew 23: 16-24</blockquote>
From what I understand of the Pharisees’ interpretation of Torah, they had established a hierarchy within it to help them give a proper order to their lives. How do we follow the whole Torah? What does that mean or actually look like? It can be, or at the very least seem, confusing and contradictory. They had thus divided it up between the “heavier” and “lighter” commandments, and so the “heavier” ones “carried more weight” for their lives. <br />
<br />
Jesus also criticizes this system of interpretation elsewhere. But here, I hear him specifically naming it as an arbitrary system of meaning by which those in power were able to carve the life they wanted out of Torah. And, I hear Jesus naming the life they wanted as the one where they get the salutations in the marketplaces and the chief couch at meals (see vv. 5-7). They had articulated an interpretation of meaning that established and maintained their own social honor and class hierarchy. <br />
<br />
In this passage, I also hear Jesus addressing that and how identity was conferred in relation to the Temple. He who swears by the glory of the gold of the Temple or by the value of the offering he, as one of high social and economic class is able to make, is staking his life on his own ability to contribute to, or even lead, Israel’s Nationalistic hopes in the face of Roman imperial insult and oppression on the ritual purity of the Temple as designated by the arbitrary and ideological system of meaning that he himself had helped to create and maintain! <br />
<br />
As such, I hear in these words from Jesus as a warning to us of what’s at stake in “keeping the name holy.” Are we praying a curse on ourselves when we pray “hallowed by thy name” while also making such oaths based on our arbitrary and destructive systems of meaning that we ourselves create or designate for “order of worship”? Pictured here is Donald Trump, on June 1, 202, in the midst of the protests against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Would Jesus’ implicit warning to the scribes and Pharisees have meaning here for Trump and those who give their allegiance to him? <br />
<br />
When I was practicing as an Architect, I remember my mentor referring to the Architectural plan as an act of faith. When an Architect draws that plan up, he is staking his life on it. It’s a kind of oath. And, when he signs a contract with the builder and owner, he is swearing this investment of his life on the imagined building he hopes to see come to fruition. Also when I was an architect, out of my sense of divine calling and mission, out of a legitimately profound sense of meaning and purpose for my life, I tried in my own mind to reconcile my practice of Architecture with worship of the one true God of Israel and of all creation. <br />
<br />
But, what I really ended up doing was placing more interpretive weight on the brick and mortar of the buildings I helped design than on the people who make and dwell in them. I didn’t view my profession as a profession of service to and love for my neighbor. But, unbeknownst to me at the time, I practiced Architecture instead as the erection of monuments to my own talent and hoped-for glory. Once, while in the midst of a design-build project, the owner decided – without telling us, as the design team - to change some of the material finishes near the front of the building in order to make it look “more expensive.” When I discovered this change, I was so exaggeratedly furious that I screamed at the top of my lungs to the heavens for a half hour until I lost my voice. <br />
<br />
The reason for my fury was, ironically, the building owner’s having placed more weight on an arbitrary system of meaning oriented around material commodificaiton rather than around the system of meaning we had designated around a rhythmic set of “musical” relationships between the resultingly (no longer so) harmonious parts of the building. This became ironic a year later when, in the wake of the economic downturn, I was laid off and, in the processing and confronting of my resulting feelings of pain and loss, shame and unworthiness, I realized that I had been treating “Architect” as a market-driven consumer identity. <br />
<br />
I was confronted with the fact that I had tried to reconcile Architecture to worship but had, in the end, essentially been worshipping my own practicing of Architecture. I had established an arbitrary hierarchy of meaning by which I could have my own version of “the chief couch at meals” and “salutations in the marketplaces” in accordance with and oriented around a system of worship by which I had found my identity. I can now hear Jesus saying: “You blind fool! Which is greater, the architecture, or the image of God dwelling in and among it?” And, I can now hear this as Good News, because <i>I am the image of God</i> dwelling in and among it! <br />
<br />
I repeated these same dynamics years later. When I got my nursing license in September of 2014, I prayed with my accountability partners that I would not take “Nurse” on as “my identity” in the same way. After struggling for a year and getting fired from my second nursing job in the midst of continuing to strive for an identity in the world, I found myself confronted with the reality that I had again setup an arbitrarily system of interpretation of the world and of my life and thus made “nurse” my identity in and among the marketplace of American desire and consumer choice in my blind fool’s attempt to live out the Way of Jesus. <br />
<br />
I thus, a year and a half after having gotten my nursing license, went on to work as a “servant” in a restaurant for a year while diving deeply into scriptures about joyful service in love and into Peter’s texts about his own confrontations with his pride and shame, failures and successes in his discipleship to Jesus the Anointed One. “You blind fool! Which is greater, the nurse’s uniform or the image of God wearing it?” Through actual practice “in my bones” and with my feet as a “servant” – which involved a lot of very difficult and humbling lessons and required a number of confrontations with my shame, my pride, and my economic fears - I again became more readily able to hear that as Good News from God. <br />
<br />
And, two years after starting life as a “servant” in a restaurant, I was again beginning life practicing nursing, this time serving families and patients as a hospice nurse and making more money than I ever had while finding my identity and glory in Architectural monuments to myself. Having more fully submitted myself to the Way of Love, I am getting paid MORE to more honestly and truthfully tend to “the weightier things of the law, the judgment and the mercy and the faith.” <br />
<br />
This is to say nothing of the arbitrary systems of ideological meaning by which our model Evangelicals who we follow after and are discipled by - such as John McArthur, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr, Tim LaHay, and Ken Ham - articulate interpretations of meaning of Torah that work to establish and maintain our own social honor and class hierarchy around a Nationalistic image of God. In other words, this is to say nothing of the more specific ways that we do the very things Jesus angrily names as what the scribes and Pharisees were doing, to lamentably destructive ends. <br />
<br />
Do you stake your life on arbitrary systems of meaning that work towards social ends that are foreign to the vision of shared life, struggle, and endurance into which Jesus calls and invites us? How so? Can you hear the truth of that as Good News that is freeing for you, that dignifies the imago dei that is the very personhood of yourself and those who are not at all like you? <br />
Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-14273949344611313962020-11-04T15:13:00.000-08:002020-11-06T21:28:22.781-08:00Dear White Friends: It’s Election Week, Day 4<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAUgOewP38_vQqRzYTXMiwWkoIh6VwRzB9KHoptHs1eQNeJdvj8JcxRWzgWLk-ZTVob35ADLd-HWoWwpfp9vDv56pwQBhzGgbmttwlqRqdWmv0VzgI3N7TzQNuEVwYzcHlpXv-cQ/s600/04+western+branch+community+church.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAUgOewP38_vQqRzYTXMiwWkoIh6VwRzB9KHoptHs1eQNeJdvj8JcxRWzgWLk-ZTVob35ADLd-HWoWwpfp9vDv56pwQBhzGgbmttwlqRqdWmv0VzgI3N7TzQNuEVwYzcHlpXv-cQ/s400/04+western+branch+community+church.jpg"/></a></div>
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, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, <b>ELECTS</b> - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day.html" target="_blank">see my reflection on Day 1</a>, Sunday. <br />
<br />
Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23. <br />
“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, <i>if I consider my own place</i> 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? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance? <br />
<br />
It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results. If you would like to go back and engage with my previous reflections on Matthew, you can click on the following links: Monday, <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day_2.html" target="_blank">Day 2</a>, Tuesday, <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day_3.html" target="_blank">Day 3</a>. <br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Wednesday, Day 4: <br />
<br />
<i>You travel all about the sea and the dry land to make one convert, and when it is done you make him twice the son of Hinnon’s Vale as you yourselves.</i> – Matthew 23: 15<br />
<br />
While I was working as a sever in nursing school and hating my job, I was also engaged at a large, local church called “Western Branch Community Church.” Its sanctuary is pictured here. True to its vision, it has since become multi-campus and changed its name to a more displaced and generic one. <br />
<br />
On the margins of its large, social, fellowship space at its heart were three smaller spaces of note. One was a coffee shop, where drinks and pastries were actually bought and sold. Another was a space of racks and shelves where I could freely chose for myself from a large assortment of many objects for sale that I could, once bought, then identify myself with the church and grasp for myself into my possession proofs of its branding upon my person: T shirts and sweatshirts, coffee mugs and bracelets, bookmarks and house decorations. By entering into that space of transaction, I was also able to clothe myself in her righteousness. The third smaller space of note inside the larger social space at the heart of the church was the information station. I could stop there to most conveniently and easily find out how to bind my identity to her brand, if I so chose. <br />
<br />
The large social space at the heart of that church was oriented most primarily in relation to the even larger “sanctuary” that was adjacent to it. In that space, I was offered an experience of loud, high quality worship music, of engaging, entertaining speeches by charismatic “leaders,” of highly produced and light-hearted videos for my consumption, and of funny skits to make me laugh and ease the anxiety of being in such a mass of social space where my anonymity predominated. The explicitly stated goal around which the entire worship experience inside that massive sanctuary was organized was to increase the numbers of attendees to as to also thus increase the number of “converts.”<br />
<br />
So, while working at a low level job that I hated while freely reaching for a higher level consumer identity with greater social and economic capital, I was also engaged in a church whose primary mission was to convert as many people as possible into discipleship into its own brand of high level consumer Christianity. Perfectly appropriate to the essentially American brand of this order of worship, every July Fourth included the solemn ritual of our standing for both the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and at attention to the marching of the Color Guard. Every so often during a sermon, the preacher mentioned “the voice” of the “Silent Majority.” <br />
<br />
Leading up to and during that period of my life, how many times then did I “have conversations about Jesus” and, whether implicitly or explicitly, excitedly invite people into that particularly “free” “Christian” marketplace of American desire? Notably, “Hinnon’s Valley” here in Matthew 23 has nothing to do with “hell.” It is an image of fruitlessness, of utter worthlessness. It’s an image of the putrid, flaming trash heap outside the city. To become a child of it is to, according to Jesus’ words here, exile oneself as useless in his Way, to become a putrid stench before the King who is sovereign over and faithful to a people committed to one another towards a shared life of divine love. <br />
<br />
Of note, that space was mostly white. I was happy that there were some black faces scattered about here and there. But, if it had been a black space with some white faces scattered about, I would not have chosen to share that life in that space. And, I would have perceived the space to be less valuable in economic and social capital. I would have left them behind. African Americans, it should be noted, are, for obvious reasons, far more ambivalent about our ritual displays of patriotic affection than we are. And, most of them would have perceived our July Fourth ritual accordingly. If it was a predominantly black space, I would have shut the door of my life to them, and locked it behind me. <br />
<br />
As a child of consumer, patriotic, “free” American Christianity - which fits quite well with the larger system of late American consumer capitalism that shaped my economic and social desires in general - I was engaged in a system in which we “traveled all about the sea and dry land to make one convert, and when it was done I made him twice as much a son of Hinnom’s Valley as I was myself.” <br />
<br />
How might the Christianity you practice market itself to American consumer or political identities? How might it, with consumerism or patriotism or otherwise, exclude those “left behind” by your desire, whether for upward mobility, social or familial inclusion, political leverage, or a legitimately empowered voice? Does this Christianity cultivate physical, social, and economic space for shared life together among those we most readily honor and include and those we most readily shame and exclude? <br />
Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-60223429408240591432020-11-03T04:53:00.011-08:002020-11-03T14:54:08.387-08:00Dear White Friends: It’s Election Week, Day 3<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn6uGRYislsXThBdi_JMJ5162Fm5G4FLbgEU9aRCevd48i5roZGAmEvRDPWvQrz-2xSj0VB1tfgYudbkwGcWGnQJHvPgraCxfzjfGF8cmrxdzfnG2u77ppCA9l9lwi_EcFZLubuw/s600/03+enslaved+chef.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="390" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn6uGRYislsXThBdi_JMJ5162Fm5G4FLbgEU9aRCevd48i5roZGAmEvRDPWvQrz-2xSj0VB1tfgYudbkwGcWGnQJHvPgraCxfzjfGF8cmrxdzfnG2u77ppCA9l9lwi_EcFZLubuw/s400/03+enslaved+chef.jpg"/></a></div>
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, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in a word, <b>ELECTS</b> - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day.html" target="_blank">see my reflection on Day 1</a>, Sunday. <br />
<br />
Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23. <br />
“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, <i>if I consider my own place</i> 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? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance? <br />
<br />
It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” Of note, I wrote all of these before “the election,” so my reflections aren’t in reaction to the results.
If you would like to go back and engage with my reflection on Day 2, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day_2.html" target="_blank">click here</a>. <br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<b>Tuesday, Day 3 - <b>ELECTION DAY</b>:</b><br />
<br />
<i>You shut the Kingdom of the heavens in men’s faces…nor do you allow others going in to enter.</i> – Matthew 23: 13<br />
<br />
As I hated my job as a server, and didn’t want to be there, and worked and scraped and clawed my way out, you see, I was seeking another kingdom. The NRSV translates it as, “when others are going in, you stop them.” I was leaving them behind. I was shutting the door of my life to them, and locking it behind me. I was not desiring a divine joining in shared life, because I was driven by desire for something else. <br />
<br />
Because I was never in that situation, I am not sure if, bearing the fruit of my life of dissoluteness, I would have cared that a woman had gotten pregnant and been able to choose to get an abortion. Would I have cared that the door to life was shut in my unborn baby’s face? Perhaps that would have beckoned me out of my blindness and compulsively disordered desires? But I know I didn’t care that black people couldn’t exactly choose not to be black – at least not without choosing to participate in and tyrannically give their allegiance to the principalities and powers constructed, legitimized, and enforced by White power. I will give this more context to this duplicity of mine in my reflection on Day 6, on Matt 23: 25-25. <br />
<br />
Pictured here is an icon into the history of my duplicity. The broken relationship between these white men and this enslaved chef went on to shape how I identified myself and saw my world.<br />
<br />
How does the identity you choose, the person on offer to you by and in our marketplace or our political forum, shape your desires? How do those desires shape your image of how you relate to others in the world? To other persons with other identities, whether those identities are perceived as such by them or by you? Whether we “help” them or not, whether we imagine them as “above” or “below” us, <i>do we identify with them in Christ</i>? Are we, <i>in the concrete particulars of our everyday live</i>s (not just “spiritually”), beckoned to divine union with them in Christ? <br />
Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-12849628332039646392020-11-02T05:28:00.018-08:002020-11-03T14:54:39.412-08:00Dear White Friends: It’s Election Week, Day 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivA1X4WWLGb4CG4zt7fI91iCwbKuw9wQgYMMW5PcC8Tkwvf3TY9Bak6uILWsC4QIonTnQstfMVUVIZd2ea3wWrgvMfu6JUfaepbRYQfPc-tgv7RkUx335XUSiElX8kH-41OXFgJQ/s572/02+FLW.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="570" data-original-width="572" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivA1X4WWLGb4CG4zt7fI91iCwbKuw9wQgYMMW5PcC8Tkwvf3TY9Bak6uILWsC4QIonTnQstfMVUVIZd2ea3wWrgvMfu6JUfaepbRYQfPc-tgv7RkUx335XUSiElX8kH-41OXFgJQ/s400/02+FLW.jpg"/></a></div>
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, which involves and requires shared struggle, shared grieving, and shared endurance (Michael is African American, btw). What Jesus actually calls, beckons, and invites - in other words, ELECTS - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/11/dear-white-people-its-election-week-day.html" target="_blank">see my reflection on Day 1</a>, Sunday. <br />
<br />
Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23.
<blockquote>“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</blockquote>
So, if I consider my own 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? Can distant criticizing become invitation and beckoning into divine joining? Can we enter in, with fear and trembling, with sacred awe? With the practices of confession and lament, along with repentance? <br />
<br />
It is with this context and these questions in mind that I have a reflection on a portion of Matthew 23 for each day of the week of “Election 2020.” <br />
<br />
***<br />
<b>Monday, Day 2:</b><br />
<br />
<i>But do not let yourselves be called Rabbi…Neither let yourselves be called instructors…</i> – Matt 23: 8, 10 <br />
<br />
Entering into the story requires translation. And, I don’t simply mean translation from Greek to English. I mean translation between one world and another. As Michael said it in his sermon, the terms “Rabbi” and “Instructor” were part of their set of interwoven systems by which one was centered and honored, and another was excluded and shamed. But who among us desires to be called “Rabbi,” or “Instructor”? <br />
<br />
So, what are such systems for us? I desired to be called “Architect” or “Nurse” rather than “waiter” or “server.” Our systems are based on commodification driven by revenue generation. In our consumerist system, the first choice of the consumer is of which identity her or she wants to be branded with by and in the market. And, in order to participate in the system, this choice is always to reach upwards toward the social and economic capital of the column which is our territory and our personhood. <br />
<br />
By what consumer identities have you sought to reach upward towards economic and social capital in our marketplace of desire? I did it with “Architect” and “Nurse.” Frank Lloyd Wright, pictured here in his nobility, was a model of this for me. I had to be laid off three times, get fired basically twice, and then purposefully go work as a server again for a year, before I even began to learn to embrace God’s “election” into His role for me as his disciple. In grace, I was able to accept those circumstances as divine pruning. "Discipline begins in the house of the Lord."<br />
<br />
So, in the midst of this system of our choosing upwards, what does Jesus have to say to us? What is that role that he has for us in our world as his disciples? Don’t reach upwards like the world does, he says. “because you have one instructor, who is the Anointed. And the greater among you shall be your servant.” “Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for…” He is not calling to any place to where he is not showing us the Way in his very own flesh. This became especially poignant for me when, after working as a “servant,” I later realized that the people I was working with and didn’t want to be like were mostly black. And, the people I wanted to be like – the people who had more honorable and prestigious identities with greater social and economic capital - were mostly white. <br />
<br />
Do we seek to be “instructor” or “Rabbi”, where Jesus calls you to be servant? How? What does that mean for you? Can you hear it as Good News as God beckons you to enter into shared life of divine joining, of shared struggle and endurance with those who are not like you? Is that the voice of freedom from a burden that’s not yours to bear? Can you, do you want to submit to learning from and hearing the witness of fellow African American brothers and sisters rather than presuming to be their “instructor” and “Rabbi”? <br />
Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-86991849868234248622020-10-31T22:17:00.000-07:002020-11-06T21:28:07.923-08:00Dear White Friends: It’s Election Week, Day 1 <p>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, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">ELECTS</b> -
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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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”?</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiolrNYzrp1z0kTagQQeQOnly8nnMQA7Cg6THk7XejxUlDJgg5qiuvrRJVfdqLkVIgi3esRgzPRsiC7jrJcKsm_cZygS8YNaWfKDU1J7qKMxi-aupFXHr1_udbSyPadju-CZfbyMg/s400/01+Election+white+people.jpg" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiolrNYzrp1z0kTagQQeQOnly8nnMQA7Cg6THk7XejxUlDJgg5qiuvrRJVfdqLkVIgi3esRgzPRsiC7jrJcKsm_cZygS8YNaWfKDU1J7qKMxi-aupFXHr1_udbSyPadju-CZfbyMg/s400/01+Election+white+people.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">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 <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">fear</b> 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, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">with my own
words</i>, 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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I also <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">fear</b> 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 <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">fear</b> the truth
of Matthew 23 itself.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">to me</i> in Matt. 23. In this relational engagement with Jesus, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I am the Pharisee</i> (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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">“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</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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?</p>Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-49190674136458506212020-10-23T21:10:00.010-07:002020-10-24T05:49:00.620-07:00A Christian's Response To "Capitalism and Gay Identity"<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwfPsd8aZGpOCOPTorSZt0Z9aYVLBbogg3K7XBNYGvnNfYQycu_ARAcfAyRfnu1nyWqEV8CCk4s8DMJH_NyyHOdkQpY6GeYgrLu06125RErSFrUATnfM6mz5aO4bY0Y8vQ-MTemg/s512/john+dmelio.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="354" data-original-width="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwfPsd8aZGpOCOPTorSZt0Z9aYVLBbogg3K7XBNYGvnNfYQycu_ARAcfAyRfnu1nyWqEV8CCk4s8DMJH_NyyHOdkQpY6GeYgrLu06125RErSFrUATnfM6mz5aO4bY0Y8vQ-MTemg/s400/john+dmelio.jpg"/></a></div>
This week, I read Capitalism and Gay Identity (see <a href="https://sites.middlebury.edu/sexandsociety/files/2015/01/DEmilio-Capitalism-and-Gay-Identity.pdf" target="_blank">LINK, HERE</a> if you're interested in reading the whole thing), by John D'Emilio (*pictured here on your left).</b><br />
</b><br />
<b>A basic summary:</b><br />
<br />
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)<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<blockquote>"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."<br /></blockquote>
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."<br />
<br />
In other words:<br />
<blockquote>"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."<br /></blockquote>
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.<br />
<blockquote>"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."<br /></blockquote>
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."<br />
<blockquote>"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."<br /></blockquote>
<b>All too briefly and incompletely, I've found myself having a number of fairly strong reactions to this essay:</b><br />
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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:<br />
<blockquote>"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."<br /></blockquote>
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.<br />
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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). <br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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." <br />
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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. <br />
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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?<br />
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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?Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-11823448847795128852020-10-10T05:08:00.015-07:002020-10-10T05:44:51.279-07:00I'm A Functioning Polytheist<i><blockquote>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.<br />
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Well, it's becoming abundantly clear to me that I'm a functioning polytheist.<br />
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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."<br />
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And, half the time, multiple of these are at work at the same time.<br />
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I am a confusing mess! LOL<br />
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Thank you Jesus and Gravity Leadership for helping me sort through this mess who is me! Haha<br /></blockquote></i>
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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 - <a href="http://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2019/10/jesus-is-not-judge-judy.html" target="_blank">here</a> - 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 - <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2019/10/jesus-is-still-not-judge-judy-part-2.html" target="_blank">here</a> - 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). <br />
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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.<br />
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With the help N.T. Wright and of Psalms <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+135%3A+13-19&version=NRSV" target="_blank">135</a> and <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+115%3A+2-9&version=NRSV" target="_blank">115</a>, 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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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"... <br />
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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 - <a href="https://www.facebook.com/jason.hesiak/posts/10163858728235212" target="_blank">here</a> - to articulate what this god can come out looking like at times.<br />
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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. <br />
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My Golem Woman god is crafted in the image of my own sense of drowning in utter, alienating darkness of social isolation (see <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+88&version=NRSV" target="_blank">Psalm 88</a>; 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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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? Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-46475198195700680632020-10-04T08:39:00.013-07:002020-10-04T13:29:32.114-07:00The Apocalyptic Trauma of Salvation Disembodied"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 <br /><br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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Speaking of our view of salvation, another friend named MariJean said the other day:<br />
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"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." <br />
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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." <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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." <br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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." <br />
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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. <br />
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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.
Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-14335385095853820562020-05-23T22:20:00.001-07:002020-05-24T09:24:28.185-07:00The Unshakeable Voice Of The Kingdom Is First Heard The following is an exercise of what I’ve been learning to practice in <a href="https://gravityleadership.com/academy/">Gravity Leadership Academy</a>. <br />
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<b>KAIROS</b><br />
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In Gravity Leadership, we have a name for our practice of awareness of God’s presence and work in our daily lives. We call them “Kairoses.” Over the course of a few days, I recently had a conversation with a friend I will call John the Baptist (for he’s a voice shouting in the wilderness). My “Kairos” from my conversation with John was this: When John didn’t (seem to) understand me or my post, I got extremely anxious. This led to relational difficulty and a sense of conflict between us. <br />
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<b>DIG</b><br />
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Why did I get so anxious? What was I feeling in my body? What was I telling myself about the situation that made me anxious? We call this “digging.” Here, we don’t seek after trying to figure out what’s going on. We don’t come up with a theory that explains what we’re feeling or what happened. We don’t do those things so much as simply become aware of what was going on, dig into the darkness underneath the kairos. We can be confident that God is not only present and at work but meeting us in this particular step in our discipleship process, because we know from Jesus’ interactions with his disciples and others that God meets us in reality. <br />
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I experienced John’s asking me questions and making suggestions of what I should study – rather than seeking first to get on a footing of mutual understanding – as a threat against my voice, against my place in the world. I even experienced it, in some deep sense (that Van der Kolk talks about in <i>The Body Keeps The Score</i> - <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/0143127748">LINK HERE</a>), as a threat to my very life-breath. I experienced it as a social break, as exile. Pictured here is a drawing I did back in High School that serves as a kind of icon into my fear of a primordial voicelessness. This wasn't the first time I had experienced distress about something like this. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu5DvjRY8RpAYVhrFnkkpCSlYXeboMm1vs7WrfEu1GsA28s_Mqa4lv0XsqNe63N8msrSzW3X7jgvjaPSKkkLa6R5V1iKtX_EiQgz5dVhBhNxAB1I0PVugMcyaiiqVFvry7n25jcA/s1600/my+voicelessness.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu5DvjRY8RpAYVhrFnkkpCSlYXeboMm1vs7WrfEu1GsA28s_Mqa4lv0XsqNe63N8msrSzW3X7jgvjaPSKkkLa6R5V1iKtX_EiQgz5dVhBhNxAB1I0PVugMcyaiiqVFvry7n25jcA/s400/my+voicelessness.jpg" width="374" height="400" data-original-width="720" data-original-height="771" /></a></div><br />
I responded to that threat presented to me of being misunderstood by compulsively explaining myself to the point of exhaustion and exasperation. I insisted to him that he wasn’t understanding or trusting me. I also insisted that that lack of mutual understanding and trust made actual conversation impossible. In this, I implied to him that he had violated me in some way. Where I experienced a threat to my life-breath, I sought to affirm it by grasping it into my own hands for myself. <br />
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And, speaking of my body, all this week, as this was going on, my neck was in a fair bit of pain. And, yesterday, I took two hour and a half naps, because I was so exhausted. My body had been bearing the burden of this. It had been "keeping the score." <br />
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<b>BAD NEWS</b><br />
<br />
In Gravity Leadership, we also have a name for the script that seems to be driving or narrating our thoughts, emotions, embodied and enacted bodily responses, and our lives. These either are or describe idols, false stories or images of reality or self in which we implicitly trust as we examine what we’re actually doing. These “idols” that drive us, we find, time and again, replace our trust in God. We call this our “Bad News.” <br />
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My “Bad News,” then, was that someone not understanding me is a threat, to my very life, to my acceptance in community, to my having a voice in the important movements of things in the world. So, if someone misunderstands me, I must (have a compulsion) to MAKE THEM understand. <br />
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<b>GOOD NEWS </b><br />
<br />
We also, then, have a name for what it looks like to actually trust God in the arena or territory of our lives over which our “Bad News” wants to have sway, wants to take over and reign. Cleverly, we call it “Good News,” lol. This is what we hear God proclaiming to us in grace and truth. <br />
<br />
The nature of this “grace and truth” that we hear is shaped by what we know about God, which is articulated in what we refer to as “axioms." God is always present and at work. God’s presence with us does not depend on a metaphysical transaction we make with him. We can trust that He’s always here with us, because otherwise, He’s not God. God is like Jesus, which means that God is love. We may experience the deep difficulties of our anxieties of our kairoses and digging as a kind of “wrath,” but God’s wrath is really the shaking of the foundations of our human systems that aren’t built on His steadfast love. Also, whatever it is, God cares about it more than we do. We are not under pressure to “get the process right” or to be perfect. Whatever the deep desires and true wants are that lie under our kaioses, God cares about them not only more than we could imagine but more than we do ourselves. The love between Father and Son reveal this to us in Jesus and his tender and fierce love toward his disciples. So, God being always present and at work, what He does through you he also does in you. And, because the whole point of discipleship is God’s presence, the goal of discipleship is Divine Union rather than moral perfection or cognitive certainty. Some call this theosis. So, as we come to be more like Jesus, we learn love through embodied participation (not through dispassionate analysis). <br />
<br />
In response to my “Bad News” that someone’s not understanding me is a threat to my belonging and acceptance, an affirmation of my placelessness and alienation, and means that I don’t have a significant voice about anything that really matters in the world, the Good news I hear Jesus proclaiming to me is beautiful and life-giving. When I dug into that dark, painful (even physically painful), and difficult to face place in my soul and bared it before God in prayer, what did I hear Him say about it? <br />
<br />
“On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom…whatever you bind…will be bound…and whatever you loose will be loosed.” This is from Matthew 16: 18-19. And, notably, it is in response to Peter trusting and showing allegiance to Jesus when the Pharisees didn’t. This affirmation of God's faithfulness or steadfastness also came about when the Pharisees DIDN’T UNDERSTAND Jesus – which led to conflict. <br />
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Of course, this doesn’t mean that I’m the new Peter. I not Joseph Smith. The point is, John’s not understanding me is not a threat to my life. That’s a giant lie. Notice how, as I say it out loud and in light of the Good News, it sounds completely illogical and stupid. I never would have admitted this to myself or others openly. Heck, if anyone would have asked, I would have TOLD THEM that two people can have misunderstandings and maintain personal connection. I also would have told them that one person’s misunderstanding another doesn’t mean that the misunderstood has been silenced like Abel. But, the reality is that my body experienced my interaction with John otherwise. And, so what I am doing here as I hear this Good News is submitting my body as a living sacrifice before God. <br />
<br />
I also heard this: “I am ‘removing’ or ‘shaking’ ‘created things,’ so that what cannot be shaken remains. You are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken. A kingdom of cruciform grace and love, where things are upside down. Where to die is to live, and to submit and listen is for you to be refashioned in the image of the God whose voice comes to reign in what felt to you like death.” – Hebrews 12: 27-29. Conversation isn't actually impossible just because I am misunderstood. I can still listen and respond. <br />
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<b>DO</b><br />
<br />
This leads naturally into what, in Gravity Leadership, we call our “Do.” If my body is a living sacrifice before God, then my “Do” is not the application of a principle or theory to which I mentally assent or gain firm conviction about through greater conceptual knowledge. Rather, my “Do” is my actually trusting God in concrete, specific, and measurable ways in the specific arena or territory of my “Bad News” where God’s Good News comes to reign AS I PRACTICE MY “DO.” Yes, this is at times exciting and exhilarating; it fills us with joy. <br />
<br />
My “Do” in relationship with John was this: “See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and through it may become defiled. Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see God.” – Hebrews 12: 15, 14. “Love does not insist on its own way…is not irritable or resentful." – 1 Corinthians 13: 5. The guides for my DO were already present in the proclamation of Good News. <br />
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So, more specifically, concretely, and measurably, as an outworking of a new freedom found in trusting God in the unshakeableness of His goodness, love, and grace, of the Way He showed us and to which He commissions us, I was given the task to apologize to John for “insisting on my own way.” To show GRACE to John in the face of his not understanding or trusting me. <br />
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In Gravity Leadership, we also learn that “Love always has a ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’” My ‘Yes” here is that “Love is patient” – 1 Cor. 13: 4. Because trust submits myself to an open horizon where not only might I not be understood but where I listen and receive the voice and message that John holds dear and valuable, I don’t and cannot control what John SEES. Love is my renouncing of my compulsion to make John see what I’m saying, value me enough to hear me, to see ME. “God cares about it more than I do”; the “it” in this case is ME. <br />
<br />
So, what I actually ended up doing, in the concrete, was sending John an apology for not being more graceful with him and for “insisting on my own way.” I also asked that he forgive me and affirmed that I value his friendship. And then, after I heard and acted on the "Good News," I felt much lighter and freer. I didn't feel so tired, and, after days of pain, my neck didn't hurt.<br />
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<b>DEBREIF </b><br />
<br />
In Gravity Leadership, we also “Debrief” after our "Do." As our Workbook says, Debriefing does two things: it provides accountability and more kairos moments. “Accountability” here does not mean accusation in failure as adversaries or antagonists. In Debriefing, instead, we advocate for one another’s good in grace, truth, and love. Also: “The more we do, the more we see, which brings about more Kairoses…Responding to God’s grace opens up new possibilities that wouldn’t have existed unless we said ‘Yes’ to the grace God was offering…DEBRIEFing is how we continue to pay attention to how God continues to work in us as we DO in response to the good news.”<br />
<br />
Prior to my apology to John, as I had been "insisting on my own way," he had stopped responding to me (and, he had told me he was going to do so). When I apologized to John, He responded with forgiveness and by also affirming his valuing of our friendship. <br />
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This entire Kairos that I am recapitulating here actually also constitutes a “debrief” on previous kairoses and responses to good and bad news regarding the setting of boundaries in abusive relationships and regarding my processing my response when John and other friends kept telling me I should write a book. <br />
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I was berated in the past and, in response, heard the Good News that “I see you, you matter to me, and your perspective is valuable.” My response to that Good News was to set boundaries in the relationships in which I experienced abuse. <br />
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Also in the past, knowing my temptation to grasp for my own inflated sense of self-importance, I experienced anxiety when I was repeatedly told I should write a book. In response, I heard the Good News that speech occurs naturally in COMMUNication among COMMUNITY and that authority can only be given away. Authority empowers others. This meant that I did not have to decide whether or not to write a book, that my speech doesn’t bear the pressure of itself being a new creation but is only a report of what God has done. I then began to more purposefully practice empowering others with my speech. I wrote about this <a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/05/being-sent-and-empowered-as-witness-is.html">HERE (see link)</a>. <br />
<br />
John’s initial foray into the conversation that led to THIS kairos was: 1. in response to his apparently not understanding the point of what I was saying, 2. telling me I should study something important to him. I did not initially empower him by validating the treasure that he presented before me for my own study or acknowledgement. I instead tried to toe the line between gentleness and asserting myself with an explanation of the point he had missed. It didn’t work, lol. I eventually did empower him by asking how he would address what I was addressing differently from how I had done so to that point. <br />
<br />
When he did, that led to a great opportunity for me to clarify my point. Or so I thought. Did I mention that it didn’t work? Lol. I started off the interaction by failing to respond to and enact the Good News I had heard previously about empowering others. Doing so, in this instance, really only became a backup plan to control the narrative the way I wanted. Like the disciples in the gospels, I was engaged in a great exercise in missing the point almost entirely. I ended up misinterpreting his misunderstanding and misapplying my “Do” from a different “Good News” by setting pseudo boundaries with him in a conversation that really only amounted to my “insisting on my own way.” <br />
<br />
So, fitting the prototype of a disciple of Jesus quite well (see Mark 10: 41-45), my failure to enact the good news that authority can only be given away by empowering others lead to my having another kaiors (this one) that taught me how to discern between being misunderstood and abused. As an extension of that, this entire episode was also, in one sense, an exercise of spiritual discernment between when it’s appropriate to set boundaries, to foreclose particular actions or words, or to limit possibilities vs when it’s more appropriate to be graceful, open, and patient. John was not being abusive. John was enacting a narrative that’s important to him and, out of that, at least initially asking me genuine questions about how what I was saying related to his own story. <br />
<br />
I never would have seen that, though, if I hadn’t dug in and faced my “junk”, if I hadn’t gotten my desires on the table of communion where we are altared into the cruciform shape of Jesus, and if I thus hadn’t had the joy of hearing the Good News of the Unshakeable Kingdom in which I can place my trust “deep in my bones.” Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-23241177764212215212020-05-23T19:38:00.002-07:002020-05-23T19:39:31.292-07:00Being Sent and Empowered As Witnesses Is Free Fulfillment of What's Fundamental To All Human Communication<b>Georg Friedrich Stettner († 1639), Cristo nella casa di Marta e Maria (Christ in the house of Martha and Mary)</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-MXVVcGVZqsfj5rIVYMpJaCytWowSKpgj-naHbBeoR5N8hH2G08E487Rtw0qIeT46tLgK4SpXANM8d-D1We26zAfAQafnlusB4A8gwknb4T3pXIz8SetlI5k4-9Biu8Ki2fZDiQ/s1600/martha+and+mary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-MXVVcGVZqsfj5rIVYMpJaCytWowSKpgj-naHbBeoR5N8hH2G08E487Rtw0qIeT46tLgK4SpXANM8d-D1We26zAfAQafnlusB4A8gwknb4T3pXIz8SetlI5k4-9Biu8Ki2fZDiQ/s400/martha+and+mary.jpg" width="400" height="247" data-original-width="800" data-original-height="494" /></a></div><br />
*The following was originally recorded <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10163001811360212&set=pb.812800211.-2207520000..&type=3&theater">on Facebook </a>on Easter, April 12, 2020. <br />
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People have been telling me I should write more (like, a book). I have tended inwardly to pull or turn from that. I fear my temptation to grasp for acceptance and empowerment through the self-assertion of my voice. Gravity Leadership has helped me work through this....<br />
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Because Christ was vindicated in his claims on Resurrection Day:<br />
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I don't have to (be governed by) fear and distrust of my temptation to grasp for myself community and creative authority, participation in, or having a voice in what matters in the world:<br />
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God longs to be with us and shape us into community around Himself and his love MORE THAN we fear exile, placelessness, or "homelessness." In fact, He's ALREADY AT WORK doing so.<br />
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In Christ, the nature of witness - or of communication that happens in and forms community - that is "with the grain of the universe" is thus twofold:<br />
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1. It is simply a report of what's happening or has happened (I'm not the hinging point of it).<br />
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2. Authority can only be given away to others. It's cruciform (cross shaped). It actually CAN'T be taken or gasped; and, if it is, it's no longer authority.<br />
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THIS MEANS THAT my role in this is:<br />
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A. No one decides WHETHER OR NOT to write, speak, or "create." It is in our nature to commune and tend to creation. My role in this is ONLY a question of HOW and WHY to do so.<br />
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B. When I write or speak, I don't grasp either for what to say or for power, control, or authority in and by what's being said or written by, of, or about ME. Rather, I simply: receive with an open hand, and report what has happened (or is happening). I have a role in crafting and ordering it, but I do not GENERATE it. Nor do I determine its end, destination, or effect. I am not its Alpha or Omega. Of note, this doesn't mean that I'm not included in the story! (Paul talks about this over and over in his letters)<br />
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C. (my) Writing or speech can only be an empowering gift for others, not a display of my own power (see A). All speech is AND CAN ONLY BE an empowering of the voice of others. And, if we presume otherwise, then our speech will be an act of war, governed by antagonism. And, this will be precisely BECAUSE all speech is an empowering of the voice of others (whether or not we want it to be or are conscious of that fact).<br />
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* Pictured here is: Georg Friedrich Stettner († 1639), Cristo nella casa di Marta e Maria (Christ in the house of Martha and Mary). It's important here to know that the reason Martha was upset isn't because of the reason we usually imagine or presume. Martha didn't think Mary was lazy. Her words that sound that way were an obfuscation of the much more powerful narrative that hung overhead and that was embedded under the foundations of the community. Instead, Martha was aghast that Mary was defying social convention, ignoring established hierarchies. She couldn't believe that Mary was learning, being discipled by the Master.<br />
<br />
Mary was being trained to have an empowering voice as a gift to others in the community. The thing is, she wasn't even supposed to be in that part of the house! She was in the part of the house set aside, according to the reigning social order, for men and the authoritative things that men do. Precisely because speech is and can only be an empowering voice of others, Martha was CHALLENGING Jesus. Jesus responds by affirming Mary's voice: “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; 42 one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.” I imagine that he may have followed that up with what is implied: "And you can have it, too, should you so choose."<br />
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Also note that the painting depicts communal gathering around the One who longs to commune with us more than we fear its loss - to the point of his own death. It is in the context of this community formation in which we have and hear (the empowerment of) voices.<br />
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That he is risen is Good News, indeed!Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-82498009160072857032020-03-20T17:30:00.000-07:002020-03-20T19:11:34.519-07:00A "Kung Flu" Conversation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNwRJwAcL1X6plpQQItZ3-zGG5Ho1ogVsoVQxSGDpX9lWkkg7j1dfLoYkLTMZx3uQxinTsOM0jcopQc0kNdWX7XZ4ZwKqENEWm-OF2Rqr8Bu1jyQ0VpJ1E2jRcmx0Kjjm2vsjNXw/s1600/kung+flu+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNwRJwAcL1X6plpQQItZ3-zGG5Ho1ogVsoVQxSGDpX9lWkkg7j1dfLoYkLTMZx3uQxinTsOM0jcopQc0kNdWX7XZ4ZwKqENEWm-OF2Rqr8Bu1jyQ0VpJ1E2jRcmx0Kjjm2vsjNXw/s400/kung+flu+pic.jpg" width="400" height="330" data-original-width="625" data-original-height="516" /></a></div>Yesterday, a conservative friend posted <a href="https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/18/donald-trump-says-calling-coronavirus-chinese-virus-not-racist-12419530/?ito=social&fbclid=IwAR3A1Q8Ho7TOg1JnDVpMnaY5sc4oayncwpPlpCh6R7v88cq-OIumkIbssUM">THIS LINK</a>:<br />
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"The incidents are not and can not be blamed by the President. We are responsible for our own actions. It would probably be a good bet those individuals are with a hate group like white supremacy group, etc.."<br />
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As you can see, that was his caption. What follows is simply, merely, and only the conversation that ensued between the two of us. <br />
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****************************************************************************************************************************<br />
<blockquote>Jason Hesiak: but is calling it "kung flu" racist?<br />
<br />
Friend: Depends how you define Racism<br />
<br />
To me when that becomes harassing, over use and those who verbally assault or physically and hate associated or not that portrays as a a weaker group or person being inferior is Racism.<br />
By definition as i understand it no. Again would i use it, NO.<br />
Let me clear.<br />
I don't want harm to my Asian friends or friends spouse, and their kids and / or grand kids.<br />
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Jason Hesiak: [friend's name] by what you just said...<br />
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It's not racist to portray another group or person of said group of people as weaker or inferior to my own - whether verbally or in my imagination?<br />
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But, it is racist when that verbal or imaginary portrayal of weakness or inferiority - of another group or of person of that group - crosses the line into a desire to harm someone or multiple people of said group in some way, particularly with verbal or physical assault?<br />
<br />
**********<br />
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Scientifically, do viruses have nationalities? Is scientific knowledge authoritative in any way for you?<br />
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What is accomplished by imagining or naming an impurity that poses a threat to us all as "foreign" to my race or nation or native to another group? What desire is fulfilled by doing that?<br />
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What is accomplished when an authority figure, in particular, does that? What desire is fulfilled by imagining myself aligned or attached to the authority figure who does that?<br />
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And, you identify as Christian, right? Where do you see this happening - or this dynamic between it and its opposite - in scripture?<br />
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Friend: Jason Hesiak . your 1st paragraph is actually just the opposite of what i was trying to say.<br />
Next paragraph 2 questions: no<br />
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Jason Hesiak: [friend's name] ok thank you for the clarification. I was actually a little confused reading what you wrote. That makes more sense.<br />
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But I'm still confused, then, about how calling it "Kung Flu" isn't racist. So what about the other stuff? Because my naming an impurity that poses a threat to all of us and that by scientific authority has no nationality or race accomplishes or fulfills our desire for precisely our own purity or superiority, does it not?<br />
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Friend: We are such an hypersensitive society these wusses need a backbone. There have been things in science named from where it originated or by the founder. So from that no.<br />
However i will say tasteless as christian jokes, gay jokes, etc.<br />
For humor used to kid and tear jokingly everything . now its cant because you offend xyz but its ok to bash Christianity and traditional values. Thats hypocrisy and weak boned people.<br />
<br />
Jason Hesiak [friend's name]<br />
<br />
1. That other viruses have been named after the places where they were first known to have occurred does not make their names not racist, also. We have a long history of legitimized racism.<br />
<br />
2. This isn't Trump kidding around with a close friend. This is Trump publicly and authoritatively identifying a public threat with our public, global, ideological, economic, and, yes, "foreign" enemies / competitors.<br />
<br />
3. What makes us "hypersensitive"? What is the driving force of this hypersensitivity that wasn't the case in some other time or place? Where does that come from? How is it different or the same from other times or places? I don't really understand what you're saying about that.<br />
Edit or delete this<br />
<br />
Friend: 1. Don't give me PC crap. I don't go or fall for it.<br />
2. Ok. Yes.<br />
3. Over PC crap. Now have a society of spinless wimps.<br />
<br />
Jason Hesiak [friend's name]<br />
<br />
1. Man....to say our history is racist is "PC crap"? C'mon...how is that anywhere near reasonable or tenable? Can you even imagine saying that to a black or brown person? Or a native American? If so, how do you imagine most all of them would react?<br />
<br />
2. So what does this have to do with you joking around with your friends?<br />
<br />
3. But I'm asking what that even means? How is that different from when and where? From what you said above, you seem to mean that the difference you’re referring to is when Christianity and "traditional values" held more predominant sway in our society? But my questions remain. What or who caused the change? Why? What do you even mean by "spineless wimps"? Who are said spineless wimps? Non-Christians who hold to progressive values? Would Christians be the spineless wimps if they were the ones who didn't hold power? Should Jesus have not experienced shame on the cross when he was purposefully shamed (as Trump is purposefully shaming Asians / the Chinese)? As Christians, how do we respond to injustice, whether against others or ourselves? Just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and, create an imagination where those who wrong us aren't worthy of our attention, and overcome their wrong with our own accomplishment or identity in the world? I mean, what are we talking about here? Or, is the foundation of this vision of what "spineless wimps" means, rather that God is in charge and has our back, and so we shouldn't be losing the cultural cache the way we are? God is on our side, and the progressives are wrong and going to pay? What are we talking about?<br />
<br />
[Friend] Jason<br />
1. How i took it, perception.<br />
Ivdo get it from your questions though.<br />
2. Disregard .<br />
<br />
I then get a private message from him: “I just eliminated that post. Way to much o u t there.”</blockquote>****************************************************************************************************************************<br />
<br />
I basically intend to simply let this conversation stand on its own as a revelation of where we are. This is the second conversation in two days that a similarly conservative friend simply deleted after I simply started asking questions. The only commentary I would like to add is this. Notice the supposed connection between: 1. "personal responsibility" in my friend's original caption, and 2. The "PC crap" of "spineless wimps." This seems to imply that everything about how we relate to one another hinges on our own individual sovereignty or autonomy rather than on an inherent relationality woven into the fabric of the universe. <br />
Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-73820011215077131562020-03-08T11:10:00.001-07:002020-03-08T14:03:50.858-07:00Incalculable Pain Held In Hands of Calculable Size <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRSABxznZ-PiopcndYRg3xnm3kCdSBqlyMxqO6VIDWtqajqnrF2x9tEF7fSTtL0xQMxodfF5O4TYWjuV0tSjktfn0iruU1Qb5Yn5xWi4i-CGWi1pOD673OxQN9MzCJEJ_S8ISIFg/s1600/spotlight.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRSABxznZ-PiopcndYRg3xnm3kCdSBqlyMxqO6VIDWtqajqnrF2x9tEF7fSTtL0xQMxodfF5O4TYWjuV0tSjktfn0iruU1Qb5Yn5xWi4i-CGWi1pOD673OxQN9MzCJEJ_S8ISIFg/s400/spotlight.png" width="400" height="225" data-original-width="1366" data-original-height="768" /></a></div>In the wake of the exposure to public light of Jean Vanier's sexual abuse of multiple women (<a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/02/lamenting-me-in-jean-vanier.html">which I recently processed here</a>), I saw the film "Spotlight" last night. It's about the ongoing Catholic child sexual abuse scandal. Something in me broke, and I wept.<br />
<br />
As a theologian, J.H. Yoder has taught me a lot, so he's really important to me. Just last week, I finished reading a 75 page story on J.H. Yoder's sexual abuse scandal at his University and in his church (link <a href="http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news5/2015_01_Goossen_Defanging_the_Beast.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2ei1sWoX-JVkKAP10aP9VPcYCqUaSxFGDuuNq7_ks3NLk9T5vTVb2sAAk">HERE</a>).<br />
<br />
For those who don't know, Jean Vanier is the founder of the L'Arche community, a highly successful alternative to institutionalization for the disabled. Able bodied live in community with and in deference to the "lesser" among them. The most disabled are the most highly honored. These communities are a beautiful picture of the kingdom of God, and Vanier and his writings had been an inspiration to many. News of his sexual abuse was heartbreaking. John Howard Yoder was an Anabaptist and Mennonite theologian whose writings rendered non-violence something other than completely swept under the rug in the larger Christian discourse. He at least gave it a voice. In fact, he influenced Martin Luther King, to an extent. As for me, he helped give me an imagination for what it means for the church to be a community in and under the reign of Christ rather than, as our modern vision would have it, a collection of voluntary, free individuals. And, yet, for years, he was known to have engaged in definitively illicit and at least potentially abusive sexual behaviors with many women in his community. Many say that the pain and trauma he caused was never adequately addressed. <br />
<br />
The two stories - sexual abuse by Catholic authorities and of J.H. Yoder - have a lot in common. Everything that describes one story also describes the other.<br />
<br />
Everyone either knew what was going on or had a sense that SOMETHING was going on. Everyone knew either that they could be the next victim or could have been one in the past. If not that, then everyone knew someone, or knew that they might know someone they cared about who was or could be directly effected. People - BOTH victims and authority figures - had a hard time wrapping their heads around what was happening because of either the GOOD ACTUALLY done by the perpetrators in the community OR our image as authorities and images of the good and its meaning (this is idolatry, btw). One of the lines with staying power from "Spotlight" is, “It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to abuse one.”<br />
<br />
Yoder's victims found themselves not so much denouncing him as asking each other why he was touching their breasts. The Cardinal over the archdiocese of Boston (Cardinal Law) was told ahead of time that The Boston Globe was going to be running a story about the sexual abuse among the local Catholic church. He responded by echoing the voice of many in the community when he said, with a distant smile, "We've done a lot of good in this community."<br />
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Many people in positions to do so made choices along the way that, in the end, served to continue the crushing of the victims of abuse in between the gears and under the spinning wheels of power in local communities. Because everyone had at least "heard stories" - if they were not directly effected or didn't know someone who was - but at the same time had a hard time reconciling said stories to their image of their selves and the world, these people with any level of authority in their communities didn't have ill will. They weren't even trying to be deceptive. They simply made choices that came very natural to them. They were actually trying to do what they thought was right at the time.<br />
<br />
Of course, in every instance, these people in authority making choices that came natural to them were white males.<br />
<br />
One of the dynamics Spotlight highlights is that lawyers, editors, investigative journalists, administrators, and faculty members involved were NOT ACTIVELY TRYING to suppress the truth. The reason the truth remained buried - besides our above noted idolatrous COMMUNAL image of the good and of authority that we simply took for granted - was because of SHAME. People were often, at a very local level of contingent events, simply doing what was asked of them.<br />
<br />
The fellow members of the boys club that ran these communities were often (though not always) less overtly or selfishly uncaring about the victims and more incapable of addressing and facing the dark underbelly both of what they knew could have happened to them (if it actually didn't). Our own violent, coercive, abusive, domineering urges are repeatedly on display when we - when faced with the choice to reveal the truth - end up manipulating others into what ends up amounting to taking a ride along on the ongoing momentum of the status quo. And we don't realize that we're doing this!<br />
<br />
So, another memorable and important line from "Spotlight" is this: “Sometimes we need to question a little more when we are part of an insider group...To listen to the outsiders.”<br />
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James 5: 16 says, "[C]onfess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed." The church was established by the Lord of Mercy and Grace as a reconciling and healing presence in precisely these communities ruled by idolatry and shame.<br />
<br />
In the stories of both Spotlight's illumination of Catholic priests and the Mennonite communities to which Yoder belonged, we ended up seeing victims breaking down as they recounted traumatic memories in which their very selves - not to mention their false images of the world and its goods that the rest of us have the luxury and illusion of maintaining - were ripped to pieces as blood sacrifices to our communal false images of the good. Priests and professors are not Jesus.<br />
<br />
Repeatedly, it is journalists who sit across a table or stand facing eye to eye with victims who bear their blood drenched souls to them, either in search of healing from our shame or in tears that hold traces of the pain from which they've been on a long term journey of healing. In every instance, the victim has to make sure the journalist consents to hearing their story. The victim knows that, in the end, they will implicitly plead for mercy and grace from the one who will now hold in their hands a truth that shatters illusions and bears incalculable pain. They want to make sure the journalist is capable of holding something that big in hands of calculable size.<br />
<br />
1 Peter 2 says: "Come to him, to that living stone, rejected by men but in God’s sight chosen and precious; 5 and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ...you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,[a] that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 10 Once you were no people but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy but now you have received mercy."<br />
<br />
This repeated pattern of moments when journalists become the priests who the priests fail to be, these are the moments that broke me. The final scene of Spotlight occurs on the morning this story breaks in The Boston Globe. One of those male authority figures who could have made a different choice earlier but didn't now stands in awestruck silence, mouth agape and eyes wide open, as literally thousands of victims flood the phone lines of his office to come to him (and his team of investigative journalists) to confess their shame, disillusionment, and the ongoing brokenness of their lives born in needle marks in their arms. This is the moment of the photo above. It is my moment. <br />
<br />
I posted a quote from J.H. Yoder a while back. "[W]hat Jesus renounced is not first of all violence, but rather the compulsiveness of purpose that leads the strong to violate the dignity of others." His words are poignant. A friend close to that story and with history in the Mennonite community came and suggested I not grant Yoder the kind of authority that would quote him, to leave him behind, and to lend my ear to others (perhaps not white male rapists). I basically responded by asking her if she imagined I was aligning myself with oppressive forces. Whether I continue to read and quote Yoder or not, I did not respond by first submitting to her voice and leaning into her pain.<br />
<br />
That was not a singular choice. That was all I was capable of, because it was my entire life to this point. I am this male figure who previously could have made a different choice but didn't. I am the priest who, in my illusions, failed as a priest to hear the pain that begs for healing and restoration. These journalists were teaching me both the healing to which I'm called, and my failure in that. They were teaching me who I am. “Sometimes we need to question a little more when we are part of an insider group...To listen to the outsiders.”<br />
<br />
Last night, I was faced with my deafness. I listened, and I wept.Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14986746.post-26405262667279746132020-02-23T14:26:00.003-08:002020-02-23T15:35:03.737-08:00Lamenting The Me In Jean Vanier<b>Photo taken from the website of L'Arche Portland</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS3w1HExZusdvaKMzLM0NSx76Y_LokJ6oD60keBU0TYrwMYFBLwllM097kAjHSORbUOcx0adFMudSYIAt1MifCdYY_WbmaeohjPCo5Hsp2NGe1MibLkL30LGOoAoPQXPfFQ0t1VA/s1600/larche+portland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS3w1HExZusdvaKMzLM0NSx76Y_LokJ6oD60keBU0TYrwMYFBLwllM097kAjHSORbUOcx0adFMudSYIAt1MifCdYY_WbmaeohjPCo5Hsp2NGe1MibLkL30LGOoAoPQXPfFQ0t1VA/s400/larche+portland.jpg" width="325" height="400" data-original-width="780" data-original-height="960" /></a></div>Yesterday, along with numerous other friends, I saw the news story that someone we had deemed a saint, someone we loved and looked up to as an interpreter and embodiment of the teachings of our Lord in a special and revealing way, apparently engaged in decades of sexually coercive and predatory behavior. Even worse, it happened in the context and under the guise of his role as a counselor for the spiritual formation of the very women he was abusing! <br />
<br />
Jean Vanier is indirectly and to some degree responsible for my current vocation. I used to be an architect. I had a bit of a Messiah complex. I thought I was going to save architecture with my special gifts. That was how I was going to be known and celebrated. I, however, had a problem. I was looking at the world upside down. I now practice as a hospice nurse in part because of Vanier's teachings and the communities he instituted. He is to some degree responsible for showing me how Jesus turns our images of status and identity on their head by becoming the Servant-Man in the flesh, a Crucified Messiah. As an architect, I had no idea that my desires for how to be known, find a place in the world, be successful, have stability, and live a fulfilling life were shaped by schemes of Lordship other than that of the Lord himself! <br />
<br />
And, Jean Vanier played a part in giving me some idea of the difference. Jean Vanier helped me see Jesus. Come to find out, his sexual manipulation was extremely hurtful and damaging to his victims - to the point of being traumatizing. <br />
<br />
<b>BAD NEWS</b><br />
<br />
So, when I saw the news yesterday - <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-larche-founder-jean-vanier-sexually-abused-at-least-six-women-report/?fbclid=IwAR19qBcD4TXHH4P4Nabphnf7x0SD6PWwcx6udrY_jDIqiRX-B36aFCY6e7w">LINK HERE</a> - I was, to put it mildly, hurt and distraught. <a href="https://www.facebook.com/rvillodas/posts/10219584267231486">As Rich Villodas said it</a>, I "called him one of my heroes in the faith. Devastated to read this." So, I wasn't the only one feeling this way. Another friend, who was dealing with similar emotions, messaged me privately: <br />
<blockquote>"What do we do with the way in which people like Jean Vanier shaped our world? <br />
I’ve read and implemented a shit ton of his work and theories into the way I see the world and practice what I believe. The news of his abusive behaviour is painful. <br />
Do we chalk it up to 'God uses broken people?' That seems fucked up, to be honest. <br />
Do I toss his books, now? (That’s a lot of money in the garbage can.) <br />
I’m not sure what to do. Or how to process. This sucks. I’m sad."</blockquote>Like this young woman - <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2020/02/22/how-can-reconcile-good-evil-jean-vanier?fbclid=IwAR3GQpbE-JWoV5E38XTUYq1A3Feu52wF84kugFWYv2cZtQxzcHbQl0hGlnk">LINK HERE</a>, which itself includes a link the official report of the third party findings Vanier's abuses - we're left trying to reconcile what we knew before with what we know now about Jean Vanier. <br />
<br />
In the midst of that effort to reconcile complete opposites, I am not, however, thinking so much in terms of "God uses broken people." Though that seems true both in the scriptures and in my life, I internalized that message at a time when I held to a theory of atonement that relies on a lot of presumptive and speculative understandings of how God works in the world. And, where does "God uses broken people" leave space for accountability and transformation? <br />
<br />
So, instead of reaching to grasp hold of an understanding of what's happening in the world and how God is working through it, I, as much as I could, began to consider how I myself tend to grasp hold on and around created things or people rather than the Word of God to guide me. The news of Jean Vanier's sin confronts me with my now false image of Jean Vanier. My ability to process this requires certain assumptions about God's accounting of sin in which I don't live in fear of punishment as I confront or lament the fact of evil lurking around my own heart. As William Blake said, "We become what we behold," so beholding the sin of Jean Vanier brings us face to face with the facts of our own story.<br />
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It's true that no facts go uninterpreted. There is no pure, spiritualized Jesus on which we can fix our gaze. The message and enactment of our Lord and His Way is always mediated through and in the world and its broken vacuum of darkness. Acknowledgement of the wholeness of our personhood in its full embodiment in incarnate flesh thus makes discernment of Jesus more difficult than if we skip over all that difficult mediation stuff and just stick to the Spirit's direct guidance and teaching into our disembodied spirit of what is taught as abstracted concepts in "scripture alone." The way that doesn't shed the flesh but redeems it, after all, is also His Way that itself goes straight through the dark night of the Cross.<br />
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<b>LAMENTING THE BAD NEWS</b><br />
<br />
So, in confronting, dealing with, and reconciling to our full embodiment in flesh redeemed in and by our Lord Jesus Christ, I feel like it's good to simply lament this news about Jean Vanier without necessarily needing a "take." My first response was to grasp hold of some articulated response to it rather than to simply face my sadness. I noticed that my response was attempting to covered over my grief, which itself needed some air, some room to breathe. Noticing these responses, I continue to learn that I suck at lament.<br />
<br />
I'm also in the midst of learning my own role in patriarchy, so that made my grief over Jean Vanier's predatory sexual advances more complex. From a recent blog post I wrote (<a href="https://jasonhesiak.blogspot.com/2020/02/victorias-secrete-is-that-lust-isnt.html?fbclid=IwAR0HPYzDYhHeDdJmXWCi5vUcO2dxiOy3_me-9MfGLkekCXV4ez00ZUZNeyA">LINK HERE</a>):<br />
<blockquote>"My default way of functioning is to seek after or peruse the 'external good' I want by preying on a woman’s desire to be desired, in order to get half of what I actually want [<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+3%3A+16&version=RSV">Genesis 3: 16</a>]. In our world that is the macrocosm to which Victoria’s Secret is the micro, that desire amounts to fulfillment in being VALUED. We think of Victoria’s Secret as more 'adult' than the innocence of Disney stories, but I am having a hard time seeing much of a difference right now. Either way, in a social world characterized by what we have given the name 'patriarchy,' who is it who establishes what values?<br />
<br />
I don’t participate in this with the 'external goods' of TV’s on Black Friday. My way is a much more shocking affront to human dignity. I (at times) do it with the image of Woman. And, it’s a POWER that I am using!" </blockquote>So, of course, my first thought when I saw the news about Vanier was: "Is this true?" I wanted it be able to keep my distance from it. As it turned out, however, the news did, indeed, seem to be true. Cutting myself off from it was't going to be an option. <br />
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On one female friend's page, she was expressing anger that people are surprised at this. With my desire for distance from the bad news of my own sin, her anger felt convicting. Another female came along and said that the accusations are clearly not true, since they're just as obviously politically motivated. That turned into a whole, long, giant argument. And, I felt the need to take sides. The last thing I saw my angry friend say was that it almost doesn't matter whether the accusations of Vanier are true or not, because how we respond to them (surprise and shock or rather total lack of surprise and almost expectation) says a lot about how we view the world and our solidarity or relationship with the plight of women. <br />
<br />
Meanwhile, another more disheartened friend posted the very same article and said what appeared to me to amounted to something like: "OK I'm going to go dig a hole and lay in it now." Something like, "This makes me want to give up on humanity." (Whether that's really what my more despondent friend meant or not, it's how I processed it in my own soul)<br />
<br />
All the while, I was noticing that, as I was drawn into the content of those two posts and arguments, I wasn't simply allowing myself to feel the sadness and grief of the news. And, that sadness and grief that I WAS feeling, I should affirm and make clear, is mixed with the same lament I've been feeling lately over how I've been so verily missing the boat with my own sexuality, dishonoring myself and others for so long and not realizing it. <i>Both are really a lament of the same thing</i>. <br />
<br />
But, my desire to take EITHER side in the angry argument OR give up and crawl in a whole with my despondent friend felt like different ways to cover over and resolve my grief and lament rather than face, access, and touch it. Rather than making friends with it. <br />
<br />
That one woman's urge to declare the news obviously untrue participates in my urge to fight and win the culture wars. Whether that's what she was doing or not, I don't know. It's my urge to reach out and grasp for answers that aren't really there. My hole-digging friend's response seems to resolve the loss in the opposite way.<br />
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<b>PRAYER AS OFFERING THE CLAUSTROPHOBIA OF OUR DARKNESS ROOM TO BREATHE IN GRACE BEFORE THE LIGHT OF GOD </b><br />
<br />
So, with all of that complexity and contradiction in mind and heart yesterday, I was praying through what I said above. I know from many life experiences - including my lessons in how I made idols of my Architectural creations - that I tend to fix hold on created things or people to guide me. In prayerful communion with the Spirit, I became encouraged yesterday that we aren't called to carry forth the message of Jean Vanier but of Jesus. And, we celebrated Jean Vanier not in his self-glorification but as a messenger of Jesus. My one friend's question of whether or not to throw his books out got me to asking gently: "Did we not actually hear Jesus in Vanier's message and in what he did in and through L'Arche?" I think we DID hear Jesus in it, right? <br />
<br />
In the midst of that prayer, I began to suspect or imagine that Vanier's coercive and abusive sexual advances weren't actually disconnected from his <b>GIFT</b> for the truly and genuinely authoritative presentation of compassionate and gentle connection. To participate in our desire to declare the character and actions of Jean Vanier as simply and completely either good or evil fits the same above-noted pattern of my trying to cut myself off from the lament of sin and evil in and among myself and the world I inhabit. My shock was my desire for easy resolution, for final answers, and for a fully circumscribed horizon around a world I can draw up for myself in my imagination. <br />
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So, in the process of facing - in the safety of the grace and mercy of prayerful communion with Christ - the complex realities I know about myself and dear, close friends (I do still consider Vanier a friend of sorts), I suspect that or wonder if Jean's sin was the dark and disordered side of his gift - rather than the other way around. Perhaps it's too easy to now simply declare him a wolf in sheep's clothing, deem him evil incarnate, and burn his books in a new Inquisition. Taking this more complex approach would mean that we can't throw out our love for what he taught us, as though it's rooted in evil. Evil doesn't have that much of its own existence, much less authority. The evil, rather, is the empty, vacuous, twisted side of the good. In Jean Vanier, the world, <i>and in myself</i>. <br />
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At that point, then, I have to take the revelation of this news story of what went on in Jean Vanier as an opportune moment to embrace the fact and reality of precisely what's going on in me. To wit: <br />
<blockquote>“Communion did not come easily to me. I had to change and to change quite radically. When you have been taught from an early age to be first, to win, and then suddenly you sense that you are being called by Jesus to go down the ladder and to share your life with those who have little culture, who are poor and marginalized, a real struggle breaks out within oneself.<br />
<br />
[....]<br />
<br />
I discovered something which I had never confronted before, that there were immense forces of darkness and hatred within my own heart. At particular moments of fatigue or stress, I saw forces of hate rising up inside me, and the capacity to hurt someone who was weak and was provoking me! That, I think, was what caused me the most pain: to discover who I really am, and to realize that maybe I did not want to know who I really was! I did not want to admit all the garbage inside me. And then I had to decide whether I would just continue to pretend that I was okay and throw myself into hyperactivity, projects where I could forget all the garbage and prove to others how good I was. Elitism is the sickness of us all. We all want to be on the winning team. That is at the heart of apartheid and every form of racism. The important thing is to become conscious of those forces in us and to work at being liberated from them and to discover that the worst enemy is inside our own hearts not outside!” <br />
</blockquote><i>That's a quote from Jean Vanier himself</i> (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/jason.hesiak/posts/10160503864395212">link here</a>). So, maybe my angry friend was right. We should't be so shocked. He, in a sense, already told us about himself - just as he told me about myself! In a sense, then, my shock of this news about Vanier isn't any different from the shocking news that my Architecture had been my idolatry. Does our response not remain the same? Are we not "called by Jesus to go down the ladder and to share your life with those who have little culture, who are poor and marginalized"? <br />
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<b>GOOD NEWS</b><br />
<br />
Imagining the news of Vanier's transgressions this way allows me to remain in touch with what I'm lamenting, without covering it over, hiding it, or cutting myself off from it. I am still moving forward, both in connection to what I'm lamenting - <i>as it's still present among us and myself</i> - and in acknowledgement of how the same relationship between good and evil is ever on the open horizon before me. <br />
<br />
Imagining the sin of Jean Vanier and myself this way also doesn't excuse it or make it OK. Because it's clearly not. In fact, imagining it this way also fits perfectly with the way I've begun to, thanks to my friend Mako Nagasawa, better or more clearly imagine the scriptural narrative within the framework of "medical" or "ontological" substitution. Without confidence and trust in the love of God, without a robust belief in God's goodness, I would have more difficulty relating to my grief. As Mako said it in a now lost conversation (I can send it to you privately if interested):<br />
<blockquote>"[Jesus] shared in our fallen human nature, so we could share in his healed human nature...Jesus shows wrath against the diseases, the demons, and death. But his wrath is an expression or activity of his love - and his love for...persons...Jesus succeeded at battling temptation and killed the thing that was killing us, so he could rise cleansed and purified from the Adamic wound. 'He learned obedience...he became perfect...to become the source of salvation' from human evil' (Heb. 5: 7-9)...The sacrificial system proved medical, not penal substitution, because God was acting like a dialysis machine. He was drawing to himself all the impurity and uncleanness of Israel, and giving back purity, as an expression of His restorative justice. God was not acting like a Western courtroom judge, giving out 'punishments' to exhaust His supposedly retributive justice...God does not change a disposition in Himself. He changes something in us. Atonement is medical, healing, and restorative, not penaal, punitive, and retributive."</blockquote>This isn't a post about penal vs. ontological substitution, so I'm just going to let that sit there. The point is that God is good, and God is love. That is required for me to not only say what I've said here but to process the world in what I am learning is a more healthy way. Fear of omnipowerful punishment doesn't have to be one of the things that might stop me from even looking in the direction of the darkness I can now otherwise lament. <br />
<br />
So, in effect and to sum up, I would not even be wary of my desire to cut myself off from my sadness and grief in the first place if not for the tender mercy of the Father for the Son that overflows into love for and blessing over us. The purity and completeness of the goodness, mercy, and love of God allows, enables, and empowers me to confront my own sin in the process of grieving and lamenting the loss of the purity of the idolatrous image I improperly held of one of the heroes of my faith. As it turns out, the idolatrous image of my hero is the same idolatrous image I hold of myself. Pressing further into the good news that God not only accounts for but overcomes our sinful disobedience that launches a world engulfed in evil, the idolatrousness of the idolatry has no substance or solidity of its own for us to carry forward with us. <br />
<br />
God's accounting for and overcoming our darkness with the light of His Kingdom in Christ is mediated in and through His grace at work in the L'Arche communities established by their founder, who we now know was often overcome by evil. God's launching of His Kingdom in the redeemed flesh of Christ, with our dark disobedience cut off from said flesh at the Cross like the excretory and toxin holding organs of the sin offerings of the ancient Jewish sacrificial system, like a circumcision of the heart, allows me to confront the darkness in the heart of my idols, which is no different from a confrontation with the vacuous, empty, disordered distresses of my own heart. It's the love of God that allows me to face and lament the me in my image of Jean Vanier. Jason Hesiakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12628162727207930087noreply@blogger.com0