Category: religious experience

Some hate for The Tree of Life; Or, my apparent obsession with AUFS

I wrote an initial comment over at AUFS on my first impression of The Tree of Life.  And the more I think about it the more I can’t stand the film.  This is a reflective position and not a commentary on aspects of the film.  However, the movie lends itself to being processed in a larger cultural and political context and I think the context demands more of the movie than it offers.  I think the movie can be viewed in part if not entirely as Jack processing his childhood.  So Jack wakes up aloof from his beautiful wife (who I don’t think he says a word to).  Lights a candle for his dead younger brother.  Goes to work and sits atop a high tower.  Calls the other alpha male (his father) to apologize for something about the dead brother.  As I process the movie another conversation at AUFS comes to mind in which Brad states that the church has never been able to appropriate or face up to modernity.  That may be true but why is there any need when you have a movie like this which causes modernity’s implosion in the psyche of the man who builds modernity (powerful ‘modern’ architect).  This modern man traverses and encompasses all of evolution in order to find meaning for the death of his brother.  Oh, and who was that middle child again?

I don’t think it is helpful to minimize the white middle-class male experience but how can this expression not invite scorn in our context?  What if Jack was the First Nations man I encountered walking down the street a month ago.  I suspect he might have a few more things to ‘process’ from his childhood experience but he has no high tower in which to brood.  In this neighbourhood being young and native tends to invite things that do not allow for contemplation and so he is jumped and hit with an eight-ball over the head.  He continues on down the street with blood flowing down over him.  Oh wait, where was I again?  Oh yes I was up to the dinosaurs.  The AUFS view of this movie is all the more striking with its general tenor of liberation.  There seemed to be nothing here that would change the modern capitalist man or system.  He found his inner-peace.  Isn’t this the kind of thing that gets disemboweled over at AUFS?

It’s funny I was actually planning to right a post on my ‘conversion’ experience that I attribute in part to the posts and related scholars and thought that floats around at AUFS.  I am trying to shed vacuous and bankrupt theological language or at least press it for its implied meaning and implications.  This is a good time as I am entering into the ordination process with my conference and need to comment on our confession . . . well, we’ll see how good it turns out.

In any event I am not trying to take some jab at the general thinking and expression at AUFS.  I just find the engagement with this movie to be a little dissonant with the larger environment.  I should also point out that many of the comments were not actually made by AUFS regulars.  But as I mentioned in my comment over there I was really surprised it did not get a harsher review.   I suppose it provided some good intellectual and aesthetic fodder . . . and maybe that is all that it amounts to though the movie and the conversation seemed to be pointing to more.

There were two audible responses to the movie in my theatre.  First was a loud yawn.  This was only a partially accurate review in my mind.  I was sucked into the ‘evolution’ (but would have been just as happy to see it as an I-Max piece) as well as moved by many other visual landscapes.  Some of the social and psychological commentary was suggestive and provocative (as Brad elaborates in his original post).  The other audible review was probably more accurate.  It was a sarcastic wow-wee.  Of course this probably spouted by a white middle-class male.

When a religious person speaks: On the love of selfishness

When [a religious person] speaks it is only a monologue; occupied only with himself, he speaks aloud, and this is called preaching; if there is anyone listening, he knows nothing about his relation to them except that they owe him nothing, for what he must accomplish is to save himself.  Such a right reverend monologue that witnesses Christianly, when in its animation it moves the speaker, the witnessing, because he is speaking about himself, is called a sermon.  World-historical surveys, systematic conclusions, gesticulations, wiping of sweat from the brow, a stentorian voice, and pulpit pounding, along with the premeditated use of all this in order to accomplish something are easthetic reminiscences that do not even know how to accentuate fear and pity properly in the Aristotelian sense.

. . .

The religious speaker who purifies these passions through fear and compassion does not in the course of his address do the astounding thing of ripping the clouds asunder to show heaven open, the judgment day at hand, hell in the background, himself and the elect triumphantly celebrating; he does the simpler and less pretentious thing, the humble feat that is supposed to be so very easy: he lets heaven remains closed, in fear and trembling does not feel that he himself is finished, bows his head while the judgment of the discourse falls upon thought and mind.  He does not do the astounding thing that could make his next appearance lay claim to being greeted with applause; he does not thunder so that the congregation might be kept awake and saved by his discourse.  He does the simpler and less pretentious thing, the humble feat that is supposed to be so very easy: he lets God keep  the thunder and the power and the honor and speaks in such a way that even if everything miscarried he nevertheless is certain that there was one listener who was moved in earnest, the speaker himself, that even if everything miscarried and everyone stayed away there was still one person who in life’s difficult complications longed for the upbuilding moment of the discourse, the speaker himself.

. . .

Therefore, says the religious person, if you were to see him in some lonely, out-of-the-way place, deserted by everyone and positive that he accomplished nothing by his speaking, if you saw him there you would see him just as inwardly moved as ever; if you heard his discourse, you would find it as powerful as always, guileless, uncalculating, unenterprising, you would comprehend that there was one person it was bound to upbuild – the speaker himself.  He will not become weary of speaking, for attorneys and speakers who have secular aims or worldly importance with regard to eternal aims become weary when what they accomplish cannot be counted on their fingers, when crafty life does not delude them with the illusion of having accomplished something, but the religious speaker always has his primary aim: the speaker himself. (Stages on Life’s Way, 463-465)

However one might interpret this suggestion more broadly I am coming to see it as a fair characterization of Kierkegaard’s authorship.  Through the various pseudonyms that he employs and often brings in conversation with each other (particularly in CUP) one is let in on what Kierkegaard was interested in no matter the audience.  No doubt he was affected by his literary reception or lack of it but I still get the impression he would have done this work even if he did not have the means to publish them or to the extent he could carve out time to do it.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that there is an appropriate ‘selfishness’ that is the best way we can possibly hope to love our neighbour.  This selfishness can keep us from objectifying our neighbour,  keep us from vanity, and allow us a creative productivity freed from external ends.  Life is never so uncomplicated but I see this route as far more inspiring, liberating and motivating than duty and law.  It is the appropriate inverse of what we commonly perceive as Jesus’s call.  Jesus called us to lose our lives that they might be found.  But what is life lost?  Might it not be the one constructed by local law, custom and structural power?  To lose it then is to find it in the selfishness of particularity and in the process see your neighbour through those new eyes.

Inwardness, actuality, dogmatic policing, and conversion

I would have to say that Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments was the most anticipated volume in my Kierkegaard reading tour.  So far I have not been disappointed.  While it is penned under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus I really feel Kierkegaard ‘pouring it on’ in this volume (and as far as I understand this was to be last and climactic work).  There is no ‘imaginative construction’ to set the stage in so many of his other works.  From the gate Kierkegaard pours forth his account of Christianity as the truth of subjectivity; or, truth as subjectivity.  Throughout my reading of Kierkegaard I have tried to monitor just how he develops inwardness.  I wondered the extent to which I could accept his account given the temptation of introspection as a pretext for a spiritualism that does not take social structures and actions seriously.  I always held out on the side of Kierkegaard because of his insistence on actuality as opposed to abstraction.  I felt that the extent to which Kierkegaard’s thought would veer towards an isolated spirituality then in fact it would betray his commitment to existence (which demands particularity be taken with utmost seriousness).  This being said Kierkegaard’s notion of inwardness was always a little opaque.  Then I encountered this line about halfway through CUP,

The actuality is not the external action but an interiority in which the individual annuls possibility and identifies himself with what is thought in order to exist in it.  This is action. (339)

To risk putting this in a certain therapeutic language I would say this refers to being congruent.  For instance there remains Christian language about loving the sinner and hating the sin.  However, we all know this ends up looking a lot like hating the sinner even if it only sounds like hating the sin.  There remains a fundamental incongruence here.  Kiekergaard advocates famously in another place that purity of heart is to ‘will one thing’.  All possibilities become annulled in passionate clarification of existing in the actuality of love.  And so hating the possibility of hating the sin is annulled in the actuality of loving the sinner.

I frame this response to Kierkegaard due to my own recent conversion experience.  For years I have tried to reflect on how the Gospel calls individuals to orientate themselves towards peace and justice.  This led to significant life decisions in terms of where I lived, how I acted and what I studied.  It was only recently however that I have come to realize that I carried along with this commitment a certain dogmatic policing that continually annulled the actuality of the sort of life I sought.  This dogmatic policing continued to hold people in judgment while outwardly I tried to work for liberation (in what was of course limited and often naive ways).  I still harboured ambiguity around how I could support those in same-sex relationships.  I remained largely blind or at least unresponsive to the gender prejudice that swarmed around in many of my contexts.  I did not integrate the significance that the basic lack of resources can have on people’s lives.

I was not functioning congruently.  In what felt like a very short time something simply fell away.  I felt somehow released to love (yes I will let that stand for all its possible cheesiness).  I don’t have more answers and I don’t know how to act differently.  I don’t actually think anyone would notice the difference.  But I know I am living differently and I know this will effect my ethical posture.  I just know something changed (as I also now it can change for the worse).  Perhaps I am stretching Kierkegaard’s account of actuality but if I am, I don’t think it is by much.  My notion of’ ‘peace and justice’ was largely situated in a field policed by a dogma contrary to peace and justice and so I was given free reign to explore it within those bounds.  This is abstract and speculative thought according to Kierkegaard and the further that path is traveled the further away one is from existence.

The violent religious man of faith . . . and Abraham

Kierkegaard’s religious self, that is his conception of the self in a religious stage, has a few qualifications.  By nature it can bar no one entry on the basis of external achievement.  There is no aesthetic mood, ethical act or intellectual understanding that can stand as a gatekeeper to faith.  The movement of faith is qualified internally.  This continues to be a troubling prospect.  I still maintain that most criticisms of Kierkegaard as some demon of individualism are misguided and lack a substantial understanding of his work.  However, I am struggling with repeated refrain of Fear and Trembling which is that “the single individual is higher than the universal.”  This is the story of Abraham as told by Kierkegaard.  The ethical is the universal and must be intelligible and communicable to all or else it is not universal.  If there is faith then it must be in absolute duty to God and as such related to the individual and as such is then elevated above the universal.  But because it is now above the universal it also now rendered unintelligible by others.  Kierkegaard asks whether it was ethical for Abraham to withhold his plans from his family.  Kierkegaard ends by asserting that for the expression to remain in the realm of faith Abraham could not express his plans to anyone.  To render them intelligible would be to make them universal and therefore return them to the domain of ethics and foreclose the movement of faith.  Faith becomes paradox and Isaac restored by virtue of the absurd.  Abraham’s act is faithful but as such it demonstrates ‘the teleological suspension of the ethical.’

Dorothy Soelle in Suffering has criticized this reading of Genesis 22.  She characterizes K’s readings as advocating that,

There are situations in which the ethical orientation breaks down, situations in which people carry out a religiously based suspension of the ethical.

She notes acts of protest which were essentially ‘ineffective’ as belonging to this category (Edith Stein’s choice to go to the gas chamber when she could have escaped).  Though she says these do not point to the ‘absurd’ will of God.  She then goes on to say,

God is not the one who desires or commands such sacrifices, even if we admit that in certain situations such sacrifices exhibit clearly the truth of God beyond the sphere of the ethical.  This explanation of the story contains a masochistic understanding of humanity, or perhaps more accurately, an understanding of devotion that can go all the way to the sacrifice of one’s own life.  A theory about suffering derived from this explanation will seek in all suffering conscious and obedient sacrifice.

While I just happened to be reading this work by Soelle alongside Fear and Trembling (and have benefited from it) this seems to be a clear misreading of Kierkegaard (though perhaps not of his interpreters).  First of all Soelle assumes that description of the ethical and the religious are both equally possible.  Kierkegaard denies this.  Second, Kierkegaard is not interested in determining situations in which it is appropriate to go beyond the ethical (to do so is to remain in the ethical).  Third, Kierkegaard paints no picture of the ‘knight of faith’ as some masochist suffering.  Kierkegaard is quite clear that a person of faith may well look like some ‘bourgeois philistine’ (hardly the prototype for self-inflicted sufferer).

Going beyond Soelle it is possible to add further clarification that would keep zealots from reading F&T and then go off and shoot people.  Kierkegaard’s next work is Repetition.  Repetition occurs not in recollection or replication but in perpetual restoration.  The common example is the married couple trying to ‘re-ignite’ the passion by re-creating their first date.  To the extent that they replicate this event to the tee it will likely not end in repetition.  To re-ignite the passion there would have to occur a situation in which the same resulted from a difference.  In any event, we now have the cultural understanding and prototype of the crazy religious nut who does things because God told him to.  Its been done.  To do it again is recollection and not repetition.  A faithful act will always be that which rises above the universal and therefore can only be considered in retrospect (a theology of scripture?).  To even attempt to ‘send a message’ by such an act is to disqualify it.

This leads me to another line of thinking as I am working through Kierkegaard.  To what extent is he just extremely gifted in ass-covering (using faith as the foil)?  It seems like there would always be a way out when someone would claim to have properly critiqued him (ie his claims to the intellectual inaccessibility of faith).  And that I suppose it part of the point in that his aim is not convince but to create movement where movement is possible.

Introduction to Louis Riel and His Philosophical Theology

[Update: For those who may be interested in following this I have included a link to these posts in the ‘Translation Projects’ tab.]

Louis Riel was a Metis Canadian born in 1884 near Winnipeg Manitoba, Canada.  He was the leader of two resistance movements that attempted to preserve Metis rights in the face of the expanding Canadian government in the East.  I do not pretend to be a Riel expert nor do I consider myself particularly knowledgeable of the political context for the expansion of Canada.  However, I do know the following;

Louis Riel is a controversial figure.  He has been described as a hero, revolutionary, lunatic, self-proclaimed messiah and traitor.  Louis Riel was a deeply religious man.  Louis Riel attempted to promote an alternative politics in the face of the monopolizing government and Hudson’s Bay Trading Company.  In the process he established a provisional government in Manitoba in opposition to the Canadian government in the East.  Riel continued this pursuit in the face of extreme resistance.  Riel received capital punishment for his actions.  Riel is part of my local history.

This scant information has provided enough motivation to seek out his writings to find if there are any explicitly theological tracts.  In his Collected Works I have come across a short section that includes fragments he called a ‘philosophical theology’ in French.  So far as I know these are untranslated.

While there is a book on Riel as a religious man, Louis ‘David’ Riel: Prophet of the New World, there is no substantial study of his theology in relation to his politics in English.  There is one work in French that I hope to eventually give some attention.  This is Gilles Martel’s, Le messianisme de Louis Riel.

My intention is to slowly offer his Système philosophico-théologique in translation (it is only 12 pages of fragments).  I have no idea what this pursuit might offer but it seems helpful to at least render more of Riel’s French writing into English.  It also seems helpful to look over these writings (in addition to his occasional writing relevant to his theology) with a more thoroughgoing theological attention than has been given.

A Faithful Life?

I notice a tension between a substantive conception or articulation of a faithful life on the one hand and its entirely contextual and unexpressable nature on the other.  The notion of the substantial reality of faith is most often employed as a negative presence.  This is why my life is not faithful.  The most common refrain being that I live in the midst of and am embedded in powers and principalities that benefit the few at the cost of the many.  In Yoderian language I cannot say that I live independently of these powers.  Therefore my life is not faithful. But I can look to the ungraspable notion of grace and hope in apocalyptic action (of which I seek and participate).  So maybe my life is not faithful but God is faithful.  I am internally in contradiction.  I live in tension.  I would argue, though, that this tension is not a creative dialectic but a binding and entangling cord.  It is only a negativity.  Perhaps a negativity that will serve a purpose or has a place but it is a negativity nonetheless.

I think of a family I know.  She works and receives an increasingly rare middle-class salary.  They have bought a modest house in a ‘bad’ but developing neighbourhood.  He suffers from mental illness and requires stability but is still unable to work.  They have a young girl who he cares for.  This is not a dramatic home (well I cannot attest for everything that goes on there) but also not an easy life.  They discuss and strive for faithful choices in daily life.  I would characterize this house as faithful in the sense that Jean Vanier speaks of when he refers to enough stability for healing and growth and enough chaos and uncertainty to keep life open.

My life is not much different.  But I struggle some days even to conceive of their life as faithful never mind my own.  Negativity can always appeal to a lower (or higher) denominator.  This is binding, indebting and imprisoning.  It is not Gospel.  But I don’t know another way forward.  Is this process I am in necessary . . . is it helpful?  What would freedom mean?  Can I enact that freedom (who will rescue me from this body of death . . . )

Am I stuck in morality?  Do I need to move beyond good and evil as they say?  There is not enough nuance in the world to account for its complexity, at least in terms of possibility.  Who then is the righteous fool?  Who is the faithful one?

The Potency of Life

What, then, is the potency of life?  A life, a singular life, a life that dies in the event, a fragile life that does not live in time and cannot be evaluated in terms of money – a life that necessarily dies in its incarnations. . . . Throughout the history of philosophy, philosophers have elevated bizarre idols to obscure this transcendental field. . . . the situation is hardly improved when one throws out the transcendent, allowing capital and time to become impersonal grounds of evaluation and thought.  Life is controlled by that which does not live.  All manner of tyrants and idols have been worshipped as supreme values, as dogmatic images of thought, or as transcendentals – philosophy is superstitious, all too superstitious.

All it requires is for thought to consider a transcendental persona, to show a little care for a dying rogue, to try resuscitation once more, to breathe a little life into ‘this dank carcass,’ ‘this flabby lump of mortality’, for thought to lend ‘a hand, a heart, and a soul’.  For, in modern life, this dying rogue is no one but ourselves, and the transcendental persona of thought is our doctor.  Life is immanence, ‘the most intimate within thought’, yet it is also transcendence, ‘an outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside deeper than any internal world.’ So often the concepts of immanence and transcendence are opposed to each other, as if one could be thought without the other.  Nevertheless, the criteria for absolute immanence and absolute transcendence are the same: they consist in removing all pretenders from the role of the absolute.  Transcendence only has a relation to this world in immanence; immanence only constitutes this world in transcendence. [emphasis mine]

– Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion, 166.

On My Arc Away From Liturgy

I left an annoying comment on Tony’s recent post about liturgy.  His post briefly explores the possibility of the Church Year as offering the foundation for an ‘irregular dogmatics’.  My comment was simply stating that I wish I could comment because at present the notion and validity of the Church Year and its structural liturgy is, at present, in upheaval.  I thought I might try and trace my thought trajectory so that I can see where it might be heading.

As I alluded to my last post I have been preaching Romans for Advent.  Paul, having little to say about the historical Jesus at the best of times, has no Christmas story.  There appears to be no value in recounting Jesus’s birth for the sake of churches he worked with.  This led to a sort of paradigm shift which began to view liturgical practices not so much as rhythms of resistance but as abstractions displacing what should be existentially integrated (did that make sense?).  So we set baby Jesus outside of us as opposed to attending to the blood, shit and pain that comes with childbirth.

This thinking was further crystallized by a comment Chris Rodkey made on a somewhat unrelated post at AUFS.  He states,

One thing I have been thinking about as I am constructing an outline for a collaborative project a colleague and I are gearing up to write together is Jacob Taubes’ critique of Christianity in his book Occidental Eschatology. Essentially my appropriation is this: The liturgical calendar and liturgical time prevents any sense of Parousia. [emphasis mine]

Perhaps I could be convinced that present liturgies are simply parodies but it hardly makes a difference.  The point is the manner in which our lives are presently and existentially engaged.  As it turns out Dan seemed to push my thinking even further with his recent post.  He writes,

This is the season of Advent and some of my friends are writing pretty words about this time of waiting, hope, anticipation and proleptic action.  They are saying the sort of thing I used to say not too long ago.  As for me, I am tired of waiting and tired of being a good little fellow and “waiting well.”  With all due respect to my friends, I say fuck that noise.  If there is a God out there, and that God is lingering, deciding to postpone an intervention, then I think the only way to wait is to act as if God is not coming or to try and force the coming of God.  Instead of finding ways to make our peace with our godforsakenness we should absolutely refuse to accept it.  Anything is better than that acceptance.  Better to risk everything on the wager that God cares enough to intervene (although that usually doesn’t work out well) than to sit back and make peace with this.  Better to spit at the back of God if that is what will bring God to act.  Besides, it is actions like these, and only actions like these, that actually take God seriously.  Anything else in the context of abandonment is either a pale imitation of worship or idolatry.

I am not quite sure how to take this.  At present I read it as a Psalm which is fully truthful if not entirely complete (is that an insult Dan?).  This leads me to my present reading in Philip Goodchild’s Capitalism and Religion.  Goodchild looks at Henri Bergson’s work on time and freedom.  Bergson critiques ‘measured’ or ‘counted’ time.  Goodchild writes,

For synchronization to occur, real time must be replaced by an abstraction which has eliminated the essential quality of time – change.  Measurable, homogeneous time is an abstraction where nothing takes place.  In countable time, the living is measured in so far as it conforms to the behaviour of inanimate clocks. (105)

In brief, the representation of reality in both science and metaphysics is a commodification, replacing the thing with a quantifiable symbol fashioned for the purpose of exchange.

Bergson’s alternative is to place reason within the temporal process itself. . . . The experience of thinking replaces the object of thought.  Freedom must be encountered in the experience of thinking before it can become the object of thought. (107)

The question this raises is the extent to which liturgical practices actually undermine, overthrow or replace dominant social modes (empire, capitalism, etc.).  Or do they simply fall prey the near omnipotent work of commodification?  Does a flash mob singing the hallelujah chorus in a food court do anything more than make people feel good about their shopping experience?  Even the cultural liturgist Jaime Smith thinks not (I have not read his Desiring the Kingdom). (I also can’t help but cringe at Winnipeg’s attempt to piggy-back on this . . . apparently the press was there waiting for it ‘to happen’)

So that is a bit of the arch.  I still retain theological convictions of doxology as a sort of foundation for practice but as for present form of church liturgy I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied.  The issue remains the extent to which the acts and the structures produce abstractions or commodities that keep one from encountering and entering into the Gospel.  What is my alternative?  At present it is little more than an increasingly social form of (or socially aware) existentialism.  Or to be more naive . . . a biblical faith.  Hopefully, more to come.

I Object!

From a recent Globe and Mail article,

What attracts native-born Canadians to church these days, says religion sociologist David Seljak of St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ont., is the availability of parking, quality of preaching and children’s programs, in that order.

I object!  I know from direct anecdotal evidence that children’s programs ranks higher in drawing attendance than quality of preaching.  As a minister of the Gospel I am deeply offended by this accusation.

This Just In . . .

Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair (really?) debated the role of religion in society in Toronto last night . . . this morning’s headlines,

Hitchens apparent winner in religion debate

Preliminary poll results show Hitchens winner of religion debate with Tony Blair
I have to say this blew a few gaskets over my morning coffee.  Yes let’s set the question of whether religion is divisive and destructive in the context of simplistic oppositions requiring the perception of a single winner . . . perfect.