Category: literature

An Ill Fit

“Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.  And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.  Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’” (Mark 15:37-38)

“Creation was subjected to futility. . . . We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves . . . groan inwardly while we wait for the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:20-23)

This second quote is not our reading for the morning, but it is what came to mind as I reflected on our text and reflected on Lent as we draw closer to Easter.  Paul is coming a little late to the story.  He was not a disciple during the life of Jesus and does not seem to have been present during the events surrounding Easter.  And perhaps for that reason Paul seems to be hit all at once with the futility of creation and how humanity exists within it.

There is a certain type of futility that must be faced as we approach Easter.  At Palm Sunday crowds are ecstatic, celebrating their potential Messiah, their king, but Jesus does not mount a war horse rather he ambles in on a donkey.  Pilate, the one in charge, examines Jesus and seems to be more interested in the crowd’s response then in executing justice.  The soldiers let off some steam adding insult to injury with their mocking punishment of Jesus.  The whole story seems to be a practice in futility.  No one really gets what they want.  The people do not get what they want and they do not give Pilate what he wants.  And Jesus seems to be deliberately instigating a denial of these desires.  Jesus evades the religious, social, and political expectations imposed on him that keep us from feeling the futility around us.  To recognize Jesus then, it seems would simultaneously be to recognize a certain futility, the futility of trying to build a kingdom that does not fit creation.

In light of this context what sort of recognition did the centurion offer staring at the cross and the dead Jesus?  The words out of his mouth were simple, This person really was a son of God.  Some scholars read the statement as an extension of the soldier’s mocking of Jesus.  Jesus dies, the whole trial and ordeal is over and here, this man who couldn’t even last on the cross as long as other convicts, have a look everybody this man is truly a son of God.  The irony and the mocking continue.  The centurion remains hardened, he has probably seen it all before and at some point it always ends up this way.  Hopes are ignited, expectations are frustrated, and the powers re-assert themselves.  Another reading of the text interprets this statement as the very first conversion after at the death of Jesus.  At Jesus’s death this Gentile centurion sees the light of salvation, makes his confession of faith, and becomes a member of the kingdom of the God of Israel.

I think these two interpretations reflect our tendencies in how we encounter the seeming futility in life at times.  Sometimes we simply buckle under it. We resign ourselves to the fact that nothing changes and nothing will change and so we find our expressions tainted with cynicism, sarcasm, and despair.  The other tendency is to respond to possible futility by creating beautiful and symbolic visions that can help transport us out of some of our more difficult material realities.  We have hope in what is possible through faith expressing itself in work, prayer, and imagination. This position does not buckle under the futility but it can also lead us into illusions and denials about some of the realities in the world.

So which was it?  Was the centurion’s statement a hardened cynicism or an enlightened confession?  There are grounds for both interpretations.  On the one hand it is truly hard to imagine a centurion uttering these words affirmatively because it equals treason as Caesar the ruler of the Roman empire is called the son of God.  And second, there seems to be no implications to his statement.  The centurion goes about his work following Pontius Pilate’s orders in the following verses.  On the other hand it is also clear that early interpretations of this passage viewed the centurion as offering a faithful confession of Jesus as divine.  While still open for interpretation both Matthew and Luke offer slightly different accounts that seem to view the centurion as being much more affirming as a confession of faith.

This morning I want to consider the centurion as someone stuck between the possibility and futility of the world.  In the Roman army a centurion is essentially one step up from a regular soldier.  A centurion commands a group of one hundred soldiers.  Centurions were often soldiers promoted from within the ranks.  As a soldier there was a chance for advancement.  A centurion would have known and experienced that change and improvement was possible.  It was possible to imagine and work for something within the larger faith of the Roman Empire.

But there seems to have been catch with becoming a centurion.  The pay and standard of living would have improved somewhat, but with that advancement you became the most accessible target of a soldier’s frustration and unrest.  The first century Latin historian Tacitus offers several accounts of how soldiers direct their discontent against their centurion leaders.  At one point Tacitus refers to centurions as “the customary targets of the army’s ill-will, and the first victims of any outbreak.”  But in reality the centurion seemed to hold little authority beyond his small group of soldiers.  In fact the blame could also be passed down onto the centurion from higher ranking figures.  After Caesar Augustus died under unknown circumstances Tiberius become the new Caesar and leader of Rome.  After Tiberius became emperor it so happened that one of his rivals also died.  When the death was investigated the centurion who killed the man was called to testify.  The centurion said that he was following the orders of Tiberius.  And as you might guess we find out that Tiberius said that he never gave the orders.

So with the centurion we seem to have someone who can experience very real change and yet, in the end, may still find it hard to believe that anything really changes.  At the cross he saw the soldiers under his charge mock and abuse Jesus and he saw Pontius Pilate above placating to the crowds and he was in the middle of it, striving for advancement but forever the target from below and at the whim of those privileged above.  The soldier in doing his job well becomes a centurion and this promotion makes him the scorn of former comrades and the scape-goat of his superiors.  And so maybe there was something about this event and encounter with Jesus that simply proved too much to take and something changed.

Thinking about the story in this light the centurion reminded me a little of the characters in some of Franz Kafka’s novels.  Kafka was a German novelist who wrote in the early twentieth century.  What I have noticed in Kafka’s novels is that they often start with some dramatic change but the implications and awareness of that change are not fully evident.  In his novels The Trial and Amerika the protagonists both find themselves in completely new situations, in The Trial Joseph K. is placed under arrest without being told his crime and in Amerika Karl Rossmann leaves his native Germany in disgrace and arrives alone in the United States.  In both these stories the protagonists believe, in good faith, that the place and the system they find themselves in will yield positive results so long as they learn and abide by the proper rules.  But in each case the rules themselves are always able to steer and bend things away from their favour.  Kafka is devastatingly relentless in how far he will depict people willing to work with the system only to find themselves further under the system’s power.  And, in turn, how a system (like the legal system or like a country’s culture) is able forcibly, even if subtly, to bend your will and change your beliefs, like the centurion who believed in the work and possibility of Rome.

So if for the centurion his encounter with Jesus is a confession and a conversion experience then it is a strange one, one that we don’t know how to talk about anymore.  It is not yet the promise of Jesus lifting the burden but may be a conversion to the full and crushing awareness of the burden that the world exerts.  It is to be with Paul who hears and utters the true groaning of creation under a system and power that is able to reach and apply its pressure on all people.  This is what Paul calls sin, and it is pervasive.

Towards the end of Kafka’s The Trial we find Joseph K. who experienced just how deep and smothering the legal system is and how it thwarted any good work and intention he might throw at it.  Joseph is talking with a priest, who is also a prison chaplain, someone inside the system of the law.  The priest tries to explain some aspects of this system telling him that it is not truth but the belief that it is necessary that is important.  Joseph responds to the priest saying, “Depressing thought.  It makes the lie fundamental to world order.”  This might be one way of interpreting the centurion’s confession.  In seeing Jesus’s death the centurion also sees clearly the system that surrounded and imposed itself on him.  And perhaps like some Kafkaesque character the centurion has changed but does not fully know it himself.

In perhaps his most well-known novel The Metamorphosis Kafka depicts a character waking up one morning only to find out that he is now a giant bug, a monstrous vermin in some translations.  The change is stark, extreme, and definitive but the character does not yet know what to make of it.  He tries to go about his day as usual but he cannot, his body does not work the same, he does not fit as he once did, despite his continued attempts to fit under the old conditions.

So the centurion continues his duties after his confession not understanding what happened.  But maybe he begins to notice that his helmet does not fit properly anymore.  Maybe his spear that was once an extension of his arm now looks foreign and strange.  The commander’s voice that directed his every action was now emptied of its authority.  The gods that watched over Rome become impoverished images and meaningless rhetoric.  He begins to see that in this situation he will always be despised from below and rejected from above.

For the centurion and for anyone who encounters the way this cross, this death, this person who brings into focus the order of the world, the question becomes how you will live out of the change.  How much and or in what way will we continue to invest in trying to fit into in a system that seems to be based on a lie.

As we encounter the death of Jesus and the opening of the Temple curtain how do we continue to try and fit within the world?  I used to think I knew some of those answers.  I used to think I had to change myself but what if, like in Kafka, the change has already happened and we are trying to figure out how to live into it?  And here we need to take Kafka seriously.  In his stories some characters will go to any length believing they will find redemption in the order and system established around them.  Many of these stories do not end well.

So do not stifle the groaning you feel at the parts of this world that do fit the form God has given you.  Do not stifle the groaning that others feel at the forces that push down on them to try and conform or distort them into something they are not.  You are not alone if at times you feel like some monstrous vermin in the light of the powers and the pressures of this world.  It is, after all, a false light.  So continue this Lent as we approach the darkness, lose your orientation to the light of the world’s powers, and wait.

Amen.

Do my words ring

The readings for this Sunday included the following:
Genesis 1: 1-5 – creation
Mark 1:4-11 – the baptism of Jesus
Acts 19:1-7 – an account of Paul baptizing believers and the believers receiving the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues and prophesying.

My sermon last Sunday began with tracing the trajectory that connects creation in Genesis to Jesus’s baptism in Mark.  The imagery of creation (chaotic waters/deep, wind/spirit moving over them, dry land/body appearing) has to be one of the best candidates for helping to form a ‘biblical theology’.  I spoke of the culmination of this imagery in Jesus’s baptism and how the words of creation that are now spoken are ones of love.  However, I went on to say that the trajectory does not end there and continues into Acts 19.  Here is the second half of the sermon,

Continue reading “Do my words ring” →

Who ain’t?

Who ain’t a slave?  Tell me that.  Well, then, however the old sea captains may order me about – however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way – either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.

And so I have begun to wade into Moby Dick for the first time.  This quote is from the first chapter where Ishmael frames his calling to the sea.  It reminded me, even if tangentially, of an image I saw driving home today.  – 10 C can be biting with a wind chill here in Winnipeg.  In that wind I saw a man scouring a patch of frozen pavement for usable cigarette butts.  A pathetic image, but not an image of laziness.  A shameful image of addiction but only because of this addiction’s object.  Who ain’t a slave?  Tell me that.  The sentiment reminds me of the fine line of how little separates a certain subjective drive between an impoverished addict searching for a fix and a wealthy addict looking to increase on abundance.   You will not escape the universal thump there will always be a larger hammer than the one you are able to wield.  Those larger hammers will likely always create circumstances which will determine a level of external comfort our addictions will afford us.

How does Ishmael’s knowledge and acceptance of this reality play out?  I’ll keep you posted.

Deep calls to deep

I became an ordained minister this past Sunday.  While it is not always the tradition to do I decided to speak at my own ordination.  The preparation for this ‘sermon’ was different than how I had prepared for a sermon in the past.  My guiding thought was not about communicating the meaning of some particular text but in communicating a sense of how I understand my role and my calling.  As such the sermon developed more along the lines of ‘imagination’.  It was, I guess, poetic.  I sat somewhat uneasy with that direction.  I became concerned that it was too pious or was just some pretty window dressing.  My hope was that it was an inhabitable imagination that would draw, challenge, and invite change for those who heard it.

Well, in any event, here it is.  Based on Psalm 42:1-2, 7-8.

Continue reading “Deep calls to deep” →

A post on an essay on abjection

Having comes across the use of the abject as a conceptual tool to think through political theology and pacifism I did a little digging and came across Julie Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (link to full pdf); a text cited as forming some of the theoretical basis for the concept’s later development.  The opening paragraph is worthy of a slow read,

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts
of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate
from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope
of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite
close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and
fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced.
Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A
certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which
it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same,
that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere
as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable
boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the
one haunted by it literally beside himself.

And the concluding the opening section,

A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it
might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries
me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not
nothing, either. A “something” that I do not recognize as a
thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing
insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence
and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge
it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards.
The primers of my culture.

Kristeva in her work on abjection attempts to hover over a fundamental human experience; perhaps the fundamental human experience which is the inability to acknowledge or face our impotence in subsuming life within the bounds of our meaning.  To acknowledge that there is ‘something’ that I cannot recognize as a ‘thing’.

This is the literal shit of human life that I cannot rid myself of so I must always cleanse myself.

This is the desire for mother/father that is at once good and evil (or neither or both).

This is the inherent decay of death within food that is needed for life.

This is the eternal coding of a divine people who will not be assimilated.

These are seemingly universal realities which we cannot live with or live without.  These experiences raise fundamental questions of boundary.  Inside/Outside; Self/Other.  I came from my mother but I cannot return there.  Shit comes out one end but I would vomit trying to put it in another.  I desire to relate intimately but I cannot maintain the space between us I only vacillate between control and abandonment.  What cannot be assimilated as One or faced directly in opposition forms the abject.  A live body can be loved or fought but a dead body . . .

Kristeva traces the expression of abjection primarily in the Judeo-Christian stream orienting herself in Freud and then looking at taboo and ritual in Mosiac law and then the internalization of abjection in Christianity and with it the formation of ‘sin’.

Kristeva then spends several chapters exploring the content of French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline.  Celine is a writer of the abject as he continual hovers over the points of life where boundaries break down and where the abject is named and gagged over in fear and attraction (the Jew, the mother).  In his writing Celine attempts to push back the coding of the word to arrive at expressed emotion and with the allowance and facing and expressing of horror.  There is an attempt to explore expression that eludes or throws off the over-structuring and binding of the symbolic.  Kristeva offers this description,

With Celine we are elsewhere. As in apocalyptic or even
prophetic utterances, he speaks out on horror. But while the
former can be withstood because of a distance that allows for
judging, lamenting, condemning, Celine—who speaks from
within—has no threats to utter, no morality to defend. In the
name of what would he do it? So his laughter bursts out, facing abjection, and always originating at the same source, of which Freud had caught a glimpse: the gushing forth of the unconscious, the repressed, suppressed pleasure, be it sex or death. And yet, if there is a gushing forth, it is neither jovial, nor trustful, nor sublime, nor enraptured by preexisting harmony. It is bare, anguished, and as fascinated as it is frightened.

And then further,

A laughing apocalypse is an apocalypse without god. Black
mysticism of transcendental collapse. The resulting scription
is perhaps the ultimate form of a secular attitude without morality,
without judgment, without hope. Neither Celine, who
is such a writer, nor the catastrophic exclamation that constitutes
his style, can find outside support to maintain themselves.
Their only sustenance lies in the beauty of a gesture that, here,
on the page, compels language to come nearest to the human
enigma, to the place where it kills, thinks, and experiences
jouissance all at the same time. A language of abjection of which
the writer is both subject and victim, witness and topple. Toppling
into what? Into nothing more than the effervescence of
passion and language we call style, where any ideology, thesis,
interpretation, mania, collectivity, threat, or hope become
drowned. A brilliant and dangerous beauty, fragile obverse of
a radical nihilism that can disappear only in “those bubbling
depths that cancel our existence” (R, 261). Music, rhythm,
rigadoon, without end, for no reason.

With Celine we reach a sort of climax in which our abjection has moved from external taboo and internal sin to the practice of literature as able to evoke the fascination, fear and power of horror.  In her conclusion Kristeva then asks, And yet, in these times of dreary crisis, what is the point of emphasizing the horror of being?  Here are excerpts of her response,

For abjection, when all is said and done, is the other facet of religious,
moral, and ideological codes on which rest the sleep of individuals
and the breathing spells of societies. Such codes are
abjection’s purification and repression. But the return of their
repressed make up our “apocalypse,” and that is why we cannot
escape the dramatic convulsions of religious crises.

Kristeva then turns to the (psycho)analyst in conclusion,

And yet, it would perhaps be possible for an analyst (if he could manage to stay in the only place that is his, the void, that is, the unthinkable
of metaphysics) to begin hearing, actually to listen to himself
build up a discourse around the braided horror and fascination
that bespeaks the incompleteness of the speaking being but,
because it is heard as a narcissistic crisis on the outskirts of the
feminine, shows up with a comic gleam the religious and political
pretensions that attempt to give meaning to the human
adventure. For, facing abjection, meaning has only a scored,
rejected, ab-jected meaning—a comical one. “Divine,” “human,”
or “for some other time,” the comedy or the enchantment can
be realized, on the whole, only by reckoning with the impossible
for later or never, but set and maintained right here.Fastened to meaning like Raymond Roussel’s parrot to its chain, the analyst, since he interprets, is probably among the rare contemporary witnesses to our dancing on a volcano. If he draws perverse jouissance from it, fine; provided that, in his or her capacity as a man or woman without qualities, he allow the most deeply buried logic of our anguish and hatred to burst out. Would he then be capable of X-raying horror without making capital out of its power? Of displaying the abject without confusing himself for it?

Probably not. Because of knowing it, however, with a
knowledge undermined by forgetfulness and laughter, an abject
knowledge, he is, she is preparing to go through the first great
demystification of Power (religious, moral, political, and verbal)
that mankind has ever witnessed; and it is necessarily taking
place within that fulfillment of religion as sacred horror, which
is Judeo-Christian monotheism. In the meantime, let others
continue their long march toward idols and truths of all kinds,
buttressed with the necessarily righteous faith for wars to come,
wars that will necessarily be holy.Is it the quiet shore of contemplation that I set aside for myself, as I lay bare, under the cunning, orderly surface of
civilizations, the nurturing horror that they attend to pushing
aside by purifying, systematizing, and thinking; the horror that
they seize on in order to build themselves up and function? I
rather conceive it as a work of disappointment, of frustration,
and hollowing—probably the only counterweight to abjection.
While everything else—its archeology and its exhaustion—is
only literature: the sublime point at which the abject collapses
in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us—and “that cancels our
existence” (Celine).

The Revelatory Texts of Kafka and Proust

I am starting to get into the swing of the one sentence a day translation project.  While it seems to be cluttering up my other blog posts quickly driving all-too-important blog posts down into the depths of scrolling where no will venture I will (for now) continue to pop them up here.  In any event, I find myself fascinated by the daily unfolding of these two writers.  What intrigues me is the stark contrast in the navigational world offered to the reader.  Proust from the outset allows existence to pour out its possibility shifting between dream-life and waking-life, exploring relationship with objects, consider light, sound, memory, clarity, obscurity, etc.  All is phenomena but phenomena is more.  Kafka on the other hand is revelatory in his limitations.  He offers a stranger we don’t know, a narrator we don’t know, a room they are in, an adjoining room with other people we don’t know, a predictable land-lady who is now suddenly unpredictable.  Revelation is a mystery in its depth according to Proust.  Revelation is a mystery on its surface according to Kafka.  Both draw us forward because we know, we know certainly that something will be revealed.  But just as importantly both styles instill in us an equal certainly that what they reveal is not all . . . there is more.