The Golden Ass

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 THIS FACEBOOK POST in that group.

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.

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:

"[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."

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?

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:

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."

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)

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

In everything we do, humans always tell stories that interpret the world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (1 Cor. 1 & 2).

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.

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 difference between the second photo here (more open, more air, more light, more "seen," rising like fire towards the fire of the sun) and below 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.

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.

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 HERE, if interested).

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.

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.

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.

6. Brutalist buildings like at Expo '67 are not figurative. No figures appear. Again, they are all abstract form and volume.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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?

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").

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.

"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

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.

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.

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.

John 20:
"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..."

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.

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.

"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

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.

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.

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.

"Of course, people do horrible things worthy of prison and tied to capital punishment.

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

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.

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.

"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

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.

"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

MY TAKEAWAY: OK FREEDOM FROM (the nakedness, shame, and alienation of) PRISON IS INEXTRICABLY BOUND TO THE WORK OF OUR DISCIPLESHIP.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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

A building is a figure or image, and an extension of the humanity who makes it. Brick is our sexuality, our desire for intimacy.

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.

Drawing of a window in a town in the desert in Spain between Bilbao and Barcelona (drawing by me):

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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 THIS BLOG POST, by Mako Nagasawa.

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").

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.

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.

I say, “You see all those people coupling up. Yeah, that’s not for you.” God says, “Be fruitful and multiply.”

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?

Our history is my history, so this is both narration and confession.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In other words, this blog post is like an architectural plan to help me find my way through the intimacies woven into creation.

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.

“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

The Conception of God

Echo of eternity, this warming moment
Like the burning bush fire
For an unexplainably extended time

Penetration of the Silent Word speaking
Felt as soft wind on her skin
As the angel's unexpected light departs

Surprise imagining in Silence coming
Seed planting into my praying
Mary's joyous Annunciation

(poem by me, inspired by the the breath of God outside as I was praying today, on Chritmas Eve, 2020)

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.

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.

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."

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:

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A spiritual reading of the doctrine is that the virgin birth is an analogy for Theosis [if interested, click here for more information on "theosis"].

"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."

- Fr. Maximos Constas

Met Kallistos Ware says the following, when discussing Mariology:

"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."

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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 here).

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.

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.

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”?

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.

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.

The Authority of Love

The lectionary reading last Saturday was Mark 11: 27-33, 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?"

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.

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?”

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."

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).

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.

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, Matt 12: 22-32 and Mark 3: 20-35, "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.

Parables of Love

Then, in both Matthew's and Mark's 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:

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.

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!

“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.’” – Mark 12: 4-7.

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” (Hebrews 12: 2).

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!

Speaking of parables, the CBN story depicted above has this caption:

“The [Jericho] march was centered around Joshua 6 where God gives specific instructions on how the corrupt city of Jericho is to be conquered.

"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.'"

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.”

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.

Going Away Astounded

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 - in Matt. 22 - 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 Matt 22: 41-46, on the "question of David's son.”

THEN, in Matt. 23, 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?

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!

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 1 Cor. 13: 8-13, “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.

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.

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?

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” (Rev. 1: 7, Isaiah 40: 1-11) 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Matt. 24: 23-28. 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.

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.

“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, the revolution of the intimate, 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…

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…

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.

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.”

- Willie Jennings, Commentary on Acts, pp. 18-21

"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.

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, seen here is a screenshot from an online etymology dictionary:

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:

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

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").

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.

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.

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."

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 (Phil. 2:1-11). 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 🙂

Noticeably, here:

1. There is no "metaphysical transaction." There is simply a person who dies, lives, and will come again.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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? 😃 ) 🙂

My being cleaves to the dust.
Give me life as befits Your word.
- Psalm 119: 25

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. - from Absalom, Absalom, by William Faulkner

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 (see link here, if you aren't aware of what this is), followed and accompanied by White Flight (see links here and here 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?

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 (click here if you would like to dig into a bit more detail on this).

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.

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.

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?

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, ELECTS - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, see my reflection on Day 1, Sunday.

Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23.
“And, the greater among you shall be your servant. And whoever will exalt himself will be humbled, and whoever will humble himself will be exalted. But alas for you, scribes and Pharisees…” – Matthew 23: 11-13 So, if I consider my 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?

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, Day 2, Tuesday, Day 3, Wednesday, Day 4, Thursday, Day 5, Friday Day 6, and Saturday Day 7.

***

Sunday, Day 1 of a New Week:

“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

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?

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?

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

*Pictured here: Dead Confederate soldiers in the sunken road after the Battle of Antietam, Alexander Gardner, September 1862. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." - William Faulkner

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, ELECTS - us into is his “sovereignty over” and faithfulness to a people joined to one another. For more on this, see my reflection on Day 1, Sunday.

Of course, this provoked me to imagine how to relate to my white friends, and to my white community, in relation to Matthew 23.
“And, the greater among you shall be your servant. And whoever will exalt himself will be humbled, and whoever will humble himself will be exalted. But alas for you, scribes and Pharisees…” – Matthew 23: 11-13 So, if I consider my 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?

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, Day 2, Tuesday, Day 3, Wednesday, Day 4, Thursday, Day 5, and Friday Day 6.

***

Saturday, Day 7:

“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

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!”

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!”

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.”

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!”

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?

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).

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

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?