Author: david cl driedger

A sign of contradiction

I am beginning to wonder about a fairly fundamental orientation of the church.  The church has largely understood and accepted the role of being or bringing Christ to the world.  I do not want to rehearse the misguided ways that the church has understood this mission, namely through colonial disbursement.  It is not hard to understand how people can come to the conclusion that contemporary global capitalism is an extension of an earlier theology.  In both practices there is a message of hope that is articulated by the saved/wealthy and in both cases the message never seems to play out as being truly good news for the pagan/poor.

I came across a sort of ominous foreshadowing of this orientation to the church’s message in The Epistle to Diognetus (2nd century).  In upholding love of neighbour the author of this text states,

[H]e who takes upon himself the burden of his neighbour; he who, in whatsoever respect he may be superior, is ready to benefit another who is deficient; he who, whatsoever things he has received from God, by distributing these to the needy, becomes a god to those who receive [his benefits]: he is an imitator of God.

Now to be sure the early church was not in the same position as it was to rise to in the 4th century but the logic of disbursement is already elevated to a strong paternalistic even divine tone.  While we are uncomfortable with saying that we ‘become a god’ in this imitation, that is essentially what we are saying theologically when we talk about imitating Christ, isn’t it?

In any event, this Sunday I preached on the presentation of Jesus in the Temple in Luke 2.  This is a story of reception, of receiving the Messiah.  And how does Simeon the priest receive Jesus?

Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying,
29     “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,
according to your word;
30     for my eyes have seen your salvation,
31     which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
32     a light for revelation to the Gentiles
and for glory to your people Israel.”
A beautiful image hope and peace but then Simeon turns to Mary and says,
This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed (sign of contradiction) so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.
Here are a few excerpts from the tail end of my sermon.
So what does it mean to receive Jesus as a sign of contradiction?  I did a bit of research on this phrase and found that the Catholic Church has an entire doctrine based around it.  This doctrine holds that the church is to be a sign of contradiction; that the church in its holiness it will be rejected or opposed.  There is an element of this doctrine that I can appreciate.  I believe that to live out the vision of the Gospel will lead to contradiction and opposition in the world.  But as I understand it there is a destructive assumption at work in this expression.  The assumption is that it is the church the has the privileged knowledge of how Jesus becomes present in the world.  This doctrine assumes that it is no longer the church that needs to receive the sign of contradiction.  In trying to hold this doctrine the church itself can actually become immune to the presence of Christ.  . . . When you believe that your way of life has a privileged or even exclusive access to ultimate human truth then it will be near impossible to receive a sign of contradiction; you control the rules of the games and determine the value of those around you.
. . .

The church, and particularly the Mennonite church, has elevated the call to discipleship, the call of being like Jesus in the world.  Mennonites have fought theological wars over this matter.  When other churches focused simply on the death and resurrection of Jesus, or the centrality of Communion the Mennonites demanded that we also give attention to Jesus life, how he taught, what he did, how he treated people.  But where is the theology that asks how we might receive the presence of God precisely from outside our theology and our expression?  How does our theology and our practice prepare us to receive something that contradicts our theology and our practice?

. . .

Our tradition affirms that the church is the body of Christ and yet Christ must remain fugitive.  Already as a child in the Gospels Jesus flees to Egypt after Joseph received a vision of Herod’s plot to kill Jesus.  The French activist and philosopher Simone Weil is quoted as saying, “We must always be ready to change sides, like justice, the eternal fugitive from the camp of the victors.”  We cannot secure the place of Christ, but we can hope to receive Christ.  Our vision remains universal because there is no place we will not seek this Christ.  Our theology and practice remains fragmented because we are never so Christ-like that we cannot receive again this child, this man, this saviour, this God.  Our theology and our faith is only as healthy as it is able to receive from outside of its expression.  I am wondering if we have made a fundamental error in our basic understanding of the church’s mission.  We go out not to bring the message of Christ.  We go out to receive it, to encounter the fugitive.

I am not exactly breaking new theological ground and I am not claiming to overturn any notion of having content or a message of some sort.  I do however sense that there is still a horrendous imbalance in how churches continue to view themselves as fortresses of divine truth.  And this line of thinking has helped me to challenge a basic Mennonite goal of discipleship.  While discipleship has always been problematic I have not heard it addressed from the basic shift from giving to receiving Christ.
Thoughts?

The last vocation of the white male . . .

I am, I guess, a bit of a careerist.  It is not so much wealth that I am pursuing but attention through passion.  How can I engage what I am passionate about and also achieve recognition through it?  But I am aware, a la Levinas, that I will always be occupying a place in the sun and, as such, potentially casting a shadow over or taking the place of another or many others.  I still have thoughts of academic ladder climbing.  I contemplate a shift towards more direct political or social action.  I think about how to better position myself in church ministry.  And in all these things I am keenly aware that there are other people more deserving, equipped, and needed in these areas.  Perhaps a bit self-deprecating (or patronizing), but by and large I need to consider John the Baptist’s vocation of becoming less.

By and large I am still quite comfortable in pastoral ministry because, to be honest, I am less hopeful of those coming up the ranks in this profession.  In any event, reflecting on what responsible path I could take the true calling of the white male finally came to me.  The white male of virtue is to become a poet.  What better path of downward mobility?  What better path of losing respect and social status?  What better missionary field than the dilettantes and literary snobs?   If we would answer this calling what better way to lose our marketable skills and sabotage our resume so that entry level jobs would be all that would continue to pay the bills.  Ahh, we would become true working men!!  What better fodder for the poet?!

What hope lies here!  If language is to have power for the white male then let it come from the infinitely dense crucible of poetry.  We have inhabited the halls of logocentric power for millenia.  Let’s discard those privileged forms and consider our words as atoms, letters and phonemes sub-atomic, chase the linguistic Higgs Boson.  See if there is power in splitting.  Then sit in despair over words’s inadequacies, lament your poor shepherding skills as lines scramble or balloon in an unwieldy and cliched form but don’t be tempted infuse them with your capital.  Let your words stand or fall, let them be mocked for what they are not.

So get into training.  Have your ass served to you at a poetry slam.  Hit the dives where local rap authorities still preserve the canons of rhyme.  Unleash your inner high school melancholia!

So this season, Good Christian (white) men rejoice!  Our God, the Word, can still be made flesh.  May we be found naked and trembling in a barn, at the mercy of your mother, at the mercy of the elements, at the mercy of the animals, fugitive from authority.  And if something emerges, one simple parable in a lifetime, or one lifetime as a simple parable then good.

And if nothing comes, perhaps it is all the better.

Let us contemplate, beloved, the resurrection which is at all times taking place

Since I am on a bit of ‘ancient lit’ kick I thought I would start picking at the first volume of the Ante-Nicene Fathers.  The first work is Clement of Rome’s Epistle to the Corinthians.  In one chapter Clement exhorts his readers to consider the resurrection.

Let us consider, beloved, how the Lord continually proves to us that there shall be a future resurrection, of which He has rendered the Lord Jesus Christ the first-fruits by raising Him from the dead. Let us contemplate, beloved, the resurrection which is at all times taking place. Day and night declare to us a resurrection.

A nice little bit of rhetoric except what follows is a simple analogical extension of how nature has cycles.  This strikes me as completely non-apocalyptic and at best (and I mean that) waters down the resurrection message into something easily accessible and compatible to other systems of belief and thought.  Indeed the major example that followed was a little unexpected (though doing a basic google search found that this was a common image for many early Christian writers).

Let us consider that wonderful sign [of the resurrection] which takes place in Eastern lands, that is, in Arabia and the countries round about. There is a certain bird which is called a phœnix. This is the only one of its kind, and lives five hundred years. And when the time of its dissolution draws near that it must die, it builds itself a nest of frankincense, and myrrh, and other spices, into which, when the time is fulfilled, it enters and dies. But as the flesh decays a certain kind of worm is produced, which, being nourished by the juices of the dead bird, brings forth feathers. Then, when it has acquired strength, it takes up that nest in which are the bones of its parent, and bearing these it passes from the land of Arabia into Egypt, to the city called Heliopolis. And, in open day, flying in the sight of all men, it places them on the altar of the sun, and having done this, hastens back to its former abode. The priests then inspect the registers of the dates, and find that it has returned exactly as the five hundredth year was completed.

I don’t think its possible to escape analogy when we are talking about anything but what does it mean for the early church’s theology to find its image and confirmation of the resurrection in thoroughly natural and mythological images?

An ommission; Or, Freud was right

When I wrote my post reflecting on this past year in reading I did so just sort of thinking of which books came to mind.  Surprisingly my time reading a few of Freud’s works completely escaped my memory.  Well isn’t that interesting.  It is a tricky thing accepting Freud.  On the one hand his interpretative edifice is so coloured by his key ideas such as our preoccupation with sex that at times it is hard not laugh.  This is particularly the case in his interpretation of dreams where he can rattle off long lists of the most generic images that clearly contain a direct sexual reference.  Smoking a cigar were you, um-hmm.  But how can you argue with his interpretation?  I mean it is happening in the unconscious after all!  This is of course too simplistic but it leads to the second and, what I what I find to be, much more constructive element of accepting some of his basic premises.  In psychoanalysis everything is fair game for interpretation.  You actually cannot hide.  There is no real push to come clean or be honest with yourself because the truth is that you are already divided.  You are already actively policing the manner in which the unconscious gains access and expression in the conscious life.  But in this way you are, not matter what you are doing, actually revealing the truth, because that slippage, that policing is the truth of identity.

In as much as there is still some mourning over the loss of some stable notion of the self, of our ability to know who we really are, this Freudian posture can be quite liberating.  While the unconscious is often imaged as the huge mass of the iceberg that lurks beneath the surface of the water, the reality in adopting this position is to remove a fixation on that inaccessible mass and actually pay more attention to what is on the surface.  For it is precisely on the surface that we are able to discern patterns and movements and make interpretations.  It is here and not in some constructed subconscious that true meaning lies.  This of course also means that we do not hold to literal interpretation of the surface, as though that could in any way be self-evident (after all, as interpreters we also have an active schism in our minds!).

The enduring force of Freud’s work was in fact the power of his interpretation, regardless of how it may now look dated or blatantly prejudiced.  Nothing was out of bounds.  Because the object of interpretation was the human mind then any human action was fair, it all had to be accounted for in some form.  I am still digesting aspects of this framework and look forward to reading some of the psychoanalytic trajectories that came out of this powerful expression.  But apparently my conscious thought did not want me to remember such things.

A note on economic idols in the OT

It is a well worn observation to think of the way money functions alongside the biblical prohibition of idolatry.  What I have been curious about for some time is the manner in which the actual (clay?) gods of the Ancient Near East functioned in relation to wealth and economy.  I grew up assuming that these gods were viewed as having some inherent value, that they were at least viewed as objects that mediated a supernatural reality; that they were primarily objects of pious devotion.

I began to wonder, however, if these gods had an actual currency.  What was their value and were their value held in common, what effect could these objects produce?  I have been reading through James Pritchard’s anthology of Ancient Near Eastern texts.  In a relatively obscure section dealing with Akkadian practices of adoption (which allowed land to be sold that had to be kept in the family) there is a comment that if someone is adopted but later the father is able to conceive his own son then the [biological] son shall take the gods of the father.  I had sort of been skimming at this point but did notice a footnote at this which read,

Possession of household gods marked a person as the legitimate heir, which explains Laban’s anxiety to recover his household gods from Jacob (Gen 31).

While we have moved some way from an overly spiritualized view of the Gospel I think we are still prone to project this back into the biblical text, perhaps especially the OT.  These figures were not detached from the broader economic structure.  They were no less integrated then our money and legal documents.  This, of course, makes the demand to smash them all the more difficult.

Year end reading round-up

For the last couple of years the new year has parked a shift in my reading patterns.  Two years ago, on a whim, I decided to try and read through Kierkegaard’s published works and as that proved successful I set another trajectory.  Last year’s was not quite as well defined though I was intent on finishing a number of ‘check-list’ books that I felt just had to be read at some point.

The year began with a tour through phenomenology reading Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences.  This was followed by Heidegger’s Being and Time concluded by Jean Luc Marion’s Reduction and Givenness.  To be honest I was much more interested in phenomenology before reading these works.  A large part of that I am sure was my inability to follow major swaths of the argument.  The phenomenological turn, for me, stands out now as philosophy’s last great attempt as a re-start of sorts.  How do we observe and articulate the internal relations of the world as we perceive and process them?  I will likely come back to Heidegger at some point (and may take my hand at Merleu-Ponty) but I think its now time to give this school a rest.

Another major item on my list was Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.  While, again, I was greatly handicapped in following aspects of the text it was good to spend sustained time and energy trying to feel out how Hegel was trying to account for the whole and the movements, changes, and limitations within the whole.  It is a bit tiring to read about how what is, is the best thing that has been in terms of historical development.  Perhaps Hegel gets misread in his evolutionary account of history but it is also not that hard to understand why it does.  He is often both convincing and frightening.

Thanks to the birth of the Critical Conversation reading group I was able to read a wider range of contemporary theorists (as we stuck to article length pieces).  The stand out for me was Philip Goodchild’s work on the intellectual contribution to liberation.  Crucial to his piece was the difference between attention and imagination.  Attention is the discipline of intellect to be affected by the world around whereas imagination projects truth onto the world.

While my productivity at this blog has not always been great I have been able to get a few pieces published elsewhere this year.  For those interested I have added an ‘Elsewhere‘ link on the page links above.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of reading this past year was getting into contemporary fiction.  I attribute this 100% to getting an e-reader about a year ago.  I have rarely been interested in buying contemporary fiction and I have an aversion to reading books from the library.  I also have to admit a sort of prejudice that simply does not think there is much good fiction out there now.  Whenever I would try and read something current I also always felt that the writing style relied too heavily on just being clever.  Fortunately my first serious re-entry into contemporary fiction was reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (and just think of the benefits of the e-reader for this one!).  I probably set the initial bar too high but it gave me hope so I moved on Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles which was perhaps a little more risque than I am used to but blended philosophical reflection and narrative integrity well.  After coming to appreciate Cormac McCarthy’s The Road I was looking forward to his much hyped classic Blood Meridan and, well, as the saying goes you can’t always believe the hype.

I am currently finishing Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.  This is another massive book that is excellent to have on an e-reader.  I have mixed feelings about this book.  It is engaging.  Its plot is compelling.  It has moments of striking insight.  However, this book is ultimately putting me off of fiction again.  It is reminding me that while there is nothing wrong in simply being entertaining and well plotted there is just something more that I am typically looking for when I read.  1Q84 has dragged out too long without the payoff.  Its ‘meta-discourse’ is also a reflection on the power of narrative itself to shape and form the world.  While, again, there are moments of insight in this account I am just left feeling like I don’t care.

So what is on tap for 2013?

I missed spending more time immersed in the writings of a single author.  I did read two of Nietzsche’s major works last year that stands out as a highlight.  I don’t think I am prepared to devote an entire year to one author but I would like focus on a few writers.

I got a taste for Jacob Taubes after reading The Political Theology of Paul this past year.  I had not found myself engaging in the whole ‘apocalyptic turn’ in many recent theologies but Taubes was apocalyptic without being ‘other-worldly’.  Simone Weil and Gilles Deleuze (with and without Guattari) are also authors I have neglected to give sustained attention.  I also picked up James Pritchard’s classic collection of Ancient Near Eastern texts and have really enjoyed reading the epics and legal texts of that time period.  I am hoping to develop a crude trajectory of historical texts that run alongside the development of the Bible.  So this would move through the Ancient Near East, OT pseudepigrapha, Apocryhpha, Philo, Josephus, and then on into patristics and gnostic texts (this I am hoping will become a long term discipline).

In the area of fiction I will hopefully spend more time with Kafka and as for contemporary fiction Wallace’s The Pale King is the only one on the radar.

Well that is more than enough for year, I am guessing.  What are your retrospects and prospects?

Testifying against theological imagination

The following is a tangential contribution to the conversations around topics of gender, theology, and ontology (and for those on Facebook see the conversations at The Theology Studio group).  I typically don’t have the intellectual resources to fully engage in the critique of ideas on their own terms so I offer the following as a testimony against a particular theological formation.

I am sometimes at a loss in how to respond towards people wanting ‘proof’ that their theology/theory is misguided or dangerous.  When it comes to the current conversation around the role of theology as a practice in-and-for-the-church, with its potentially self-authorizing ‘ontology’ I am coming to see that my most incisive response is one of personal testimony.  So if you have interest in this conversation (and I think it is an important one) or just want to do some online lurking then bear me out.

Continue reading “Testifying against theological imagination” →

Why should I hope in the LORD any longer?

Jeremy over at AUFS has written an important post on abuse and theodicy.  I found the piece moving on a number of levels.  First, it is rare to find such a short post packed with equal parts confession and critique.  It is both moving and forceful.  Second, it picks up an weaves a number of threads that I find myself currently tangled in.

The post is in part a reflection of Jeremy’s clinical internship in psychology.  More specifically, it is an engagement with the tragedy, pervasiveness, and damage of childhood sexual abuse.  The post then moves towards to an engagement of how theologians could possibly respond to such a reality.

For this Jeremy sets two broad poles.  There is either the ‘psychotic’ response of somehow saying this is all part of God’s plan.  Or there is a broadly ‘process-oriented’ view that conceives God as a non-coercive reality and places the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of humanity.  The first view is a clearly horrific and almost always (or ultimately) damaging articulation on a number of levels.  The second view helps avoid some of the former’s inadequacies (to put it mildly) but is pushed and viewed itself as being too ‘convenient’ and a ‘cheap way’ of avoiding the question of such a God and such a reality.

As if Jeremy’s concise post was not insightful enough the comment thread bore out a range of responses to further thicken the engagement (with some developing and some falling into the initial account).  As I mentioned above, I am writing this now because this is both a practical and intellectual question for me that is indeed pressing.  So what follows is simply an attempt at articulating what I am already doing and thinking so it might further challenged or developed.

First I will begin with my ‘practical theology’.  In the last two years I have been increasingly influenced by aspects of death-of-god theology and more recently process theology.  Academically I consider myself an expert in neither areas.  However, the result of this formation has, perhaps surprisingly, made one its greatest impacts in how I offer pastoral care.  I have become keenly sensitive in how any forms of theodicy enter my own expressions of care.  This has been helpful, and I have posted briefly about it before.  The greatest difficulty in this has been trying to respond well when people are looking to me to console them with a particular notion of God (a God that might feel good in the moment but will come back with vengeance if followed too far), or when a well-meaning visitor is also there and invokes such theologies.  I try and return the conversation to the strengths and support that I see manifest and while I am naturally a rabid ‘meaning-maker’ I refrain from doing so in that context.

But then I pray for them.  I pray.  I don’t know.  I guess I pray like I lead the congregation in prayer on Sunday.  I don’t really know what I am doing.  The intentional part is one of naming, using language to vocalize and externalize particular realities; to put them out there before us, to have to sit with them.  And then it is asking and seeking.  I don’t know, I just do this.  I hope.  But this implies a theology of course.  Just maybe there is a God who can intervene but then what does that tell me . . .  And so theology runs aground and perhaps prayer is obscene.  It definitely feels that way at times.  It can be therapeutic but would it loose its magic if I named it as such?

I think prayer can remain viable but I am hesitant to let it slip into what I consider a vacuous liberalizing of it, but why would I be hesitant?  If prayer is powerful, but perhaps not for the reasons I once thought it was, then should I not embrace and explore that differing power?  But again lingering, what if God is listening . . . but then immediately after . . . so goddammit God has been listening?!  I am hesitant and fearful about talking about God to my three year old, about praying with him.  We do give thanks (but again there is lingering here).  And I do try and invoke blessings.  To prayers that are involuntarily on my lips are God dammit and God bless ’em.

The second half of my engagement with this post was regarding the related point of my intellectual development.  I have been recently influenced by the process theology of Catherine Keller and some of the related orientation of Dan Barber (also a contributor at AUFS).  The major shift here is thinking about what it means to try and keep nothing out of play, nothing unaffected.  In this way I cannot hide an ideological/idolatrous ‘core’ that will determine in advance how I define and position people, groups, and situations around me.  So, because of my profession and confession does this model, if followed through on, end in becoming a convenient or cheap way of avoiding the question of God and suffering?  I think it depends.  It does in some ways avoid the question.  Or for me, at present, it rejects the question in most of the terms.  But this orientation has given me a renewed understanding of bearing with the chaos (as Keller, and Barber, put it).  But there is certainly no immediate payoff.  It has not made me more effective.  It does not make me more hopeful (but maybe not less hopeful either).  At present it simply helps orient me to a tradition that has power, and could be more constructively powerful.  But things are still at play with me.  I hope it does not lead me away from the church.  There is much strength in the tradition I work within.  I also support me family with it.  But I do hope I follow through on seeing and proclaiming a good news of life.

Around the time of reading Jeremy’s post I came across a little referenced passage in 2 Kings 6.  Famine was severe.  Pigeon shit had a monetary trade value.  The king of Israel hears a story of a women who was convinced by another woman to cook and eat her son and that the next day the other woman would cook her own son.  The first woman agrees and they eat her son but the next day the other woman (who suggested the plan) does not offer her son as a meal.  The king tears his clothes and runs murderously out towards the Elisha the prophet.  After all, the prophets at this time in the Bible are the ‘rain-makers’.  The king says succinctly, “This trouble is from the Lord! Why should I hope in the Lord any longer?”

Elisha here is the only theologian who can respond in this situation.  And he gives no refutation for this scenario.  He seeks to save his own life when the king approaches him.  He gives a ‘miraculous’ bounty the next day (to refute that such a miracle is not possible) but he apparently cannot resurrect the already consumed child (he did resurrect a child in 2 Kgs 4) nor does he mention him.  This strikes me as the sort of bind any theology is going to find itself in with respect to suffering.  Turning to Job he does not escape it either, but at least he does provide a resource and hope for engagement in our bondage (though the text of course includes its own problematics in all this).

I would like to have a better conclusion to all this, but it seems that is part of the problem so I will leave it at that for now.

More than meaning

Rene Girard’s basic thesis is well known; human culture arose out of the resolution of mimetic desire. By nature we desire what is desired by others, this leads to conflict and ultimately murder. Institutions and rituals arise out of this act. Girard sees the Gospel texts of the New Testament as a revolutionary exposing of this basic mechanism. However, the church has continued to offer a sacrificial reading of the Gospel which undermines its revelatory potential.

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is an excellent and accessible overview of his thought. What I found interesting was his conclusion. At the end of the book Girard suggests we suffer most basically from a lack of meaning. I find this to be a bit dissonant from much of his work. Perhaps he is was still too heavily influenced by the existential angst that seemed to exist in the middle of the twentieth century but I expected him to move in a much more ‘material’ direction in his conclusion. Here are some of his parting lines,

“What is important above all is to realize that there are no recipes; there is no pharmakon anymore, not even a Marxist or a psychoanalytic one. Recipes are not what we need, nor do we need to be reassured – our need is to escape from meaninglessness.
. . .
I hold that truth is not an empty word, or a mere ‘effect’ as people say nowadays. I hold that everything capable of diverting us from madness and death, from now on, is inextricably linked with this truth. But I do not know how to speak about these matters. I can only approach texts and institutions, and relating them to one another seems to me to throw light in every direction.
. . .
Present-day thought is leading us in the direction of the valley of death, and it is cataloguing the bones one by one. All of us are in this valley but it is up to us to resuscitate meaning by relating all the [Judeo-Christian] texts to one another without exception, rather than stopping at just a few of them. All the issues of ‘psychological health’ seem to me to take second place to a much greater issue – that of meaning which is being lost or threatened on all sides but simply awaits the breath of the Spirit to be reborn.”

At which point Girard concludes by quoting Ezekiel 37’s vision of the valley of dry bones.

To be clear, I find this conclusion hugely attractive.  I am sucker meaning, as in meaning of life meaning, but when hearing something so well developed as with Girard I can’t help that the truth which fends off ‘madness and death’ is something other than ‘meaning’.  And here I have to default to a confessional position and introduce some notion of worship.  For all his religious language and even examination of idolatry Girard does not really address the a non-sacrificial sense of worship.  In this way I take him to be broadly in line with the death-of-God thinkers who believe we must go far enough to situate the presence and Spirit of God in and only in and only as the life-giving community.  Here again, I am deeply attracted.  But for the life of me I just don’t know who these people are that believe ‘in the power of humanity’.  I don’t see it in myself or much around me.  I don’t mean this in a self-deprecating sense but more in a I-have-been-banging-my-head-against-a-wall-for-over-a-decade-trying-to-understand-life-giving-personal-and-social-change way.  I just don’t see it to be honest.  So we offer works of worship that at our end must be purged of idolatries (here Girard, and Zizek for that matter, are right) but beyond that, hell if I know.

If you want to go the route of ‘meaning’ don’t look to Girard, the Coen brothers do it much better.