For the past couple of weeks I've been thinking a lot about what it is that makes a person lovable.
Today's Old Testament lesson (Amos 6:1a, 4-7) and Gospel lesson (Luke 16: 19-31) seem to indict us not so much for our riches and luxury, but for our failure to love (Lazarus, in the New Testament, who was at the rich man's gate every day hungry and covered with sores; failure to grieve over the ruin of Joseph in Amos). We even sang a hymn promising God to "hold your people in my heart." But, as much as I might like to THINK that I mean it when I make such promises, that I can love a people or love humanity, it only takes one instance of the particular -- one person I can't love -- to trash that house of cards and prove to me that I am nowhere near that attainment. At least, I personally think that one can only meaningfully love "humanity" one person at a time -- alternatively, that the measure of how much I love "humanity" is whether I am able to love the specific example of humanity that may be on my plate an any particular moment. The Buddha, the Dali Lama, other saints may have gotten there, but I am still far away from affirming love in every instance. And yet...
I should digress to say that I am not, when I talk of love, talking about sexual or romantic attraction, or about affection based on similar interests, compatible personalities, family bonds, etc. I mean the "your neighbor as yourself" kind which really approaches the dissolving of my individual, ego-bound need into a space where the other's need, desires and priorities are equal to my own. I am nowhere near where I want to be on this capacity, and yet I do love -- often easily, sometimes surprisingly intensely.
Why are some people so easy to love and others so difficult? As the class I taught this summer came to a close I asked myself this question concerning my students. As usual, some I had come to care for very strongly. Most I felt that I had at least connected with to some degree. But a few I found it really difficult to love. I decided that whom I loved had very little to do with whether they were good students or even good people. [I teach in a men's medium security prison; it's not always a stretch to imagine why they are there, or to imagine that they may be back pretty quickly even when they finish the current sentence. They are not necessarily what society would call "good" men, but many are still eminently lovable.] It's not a matter of personableness or likability -- some of the most socially awkward and withdrawn sparked a real passion within me, and some of the most entertaining were difficult to respond to at any level of depth. While it might be a matter of need -- it's always nice to be needed and sought out for advice -- that also doesn't explain it. I loved some who needed me, but others who were entirely self-sufficient and academically so advanced that they needed me not at all, except to validate their pre-existent capability with a formal grade.
On the same question in another venue, I thought of the many speakers we heard at Chautauqua this year [I am not COMPLETELY over writing about the subject, but I think I am winding down now...], and of those who were especially memorable. Off that subset, there were a few who actually transcended memorable, and I simply loved.
A digression -- In Mark's telling of the rich young ruler visiting Jesus (Mark 10), he writes that "Jesus, looking at him, loved him." (verse 21). Hardly two sentences had passed between them (at least as Mark tells it), and Jesus just simply loved him. People slip under and around your boundaries like that sometimes, you're not looking and suddenly they are, deeply buried beneath your skin. How'd that happen?
So after pondering this all for a couple of weeks (and a lifetime, I guess), I have come to the conclusion that the essential factor in what makes people lovable, to me at least, is the amount they actually reveal who they really are. Huston Smith, in talking about the Jewish view of human nature, writes that "human beings, who on occasion so justly deserve the epiteths 'maggot and worm' (Job 25:6) are equally the beings whom God has 'crowned with glory and honor' (Psalm 8:6). There is a rabbinic saying to the effect that whenever a man or woman walks down the street, he or she is preceded by an invisible choir of angels crying, 'Make way, make way! Make way for the image of God.'"* I am reminded of this with my inmates; it's not whether they are "good" or "bad" people, whether they are trustworthy or manipulative, whether they try hard or goof off, but whether they reveal themselves to me or remain hidden behind their defenses and behind the person they want to project. Yes, that really fits! If they are open and I can understand, I can love. In a way, I can even see myself waiting and hovering around the edges of the boundaries of the people who withhold themselves from me, looking for a crack in the armor where I can catch a glimpse of the person, the "image of God," they really are.
Referring to the public speakers, I am reminded that the woman for whom I wrote speeches and presentations for 10 years was almost universally loved, despite whether we gave her good or bad material, whether she got her words crossed, knew her material thoroughly, or waxed eloquent -- or not. What she WAS was almost entirely transparent -- she could not be other other than who she is, no matter how she tried. She gave herself away to the audience (in both good and bad senses of the word, I guess), and they loved her for it. In the same way, at Chautauqua, the speakers I loved (in the above sense of the word) were just impossible not to love (I am thinking of Ken Burns and Ori Soltes, in particular), simply because they layer so much of themselves and their passion into their presentations that they transmit to the audience not so much thoughts and ideas but their own living souls. Hard NOT to respond.
So, I am left with a paradox. We all try, I especially, to present to others the person we'd like to be -- more, perhaps, than the person we are. But those projections, if I am correct in my hypothesis, are precisely what is KEEPING us from being lovable. However I try, the projection of the me I WANT you to see is flat and 2-dimensional, it leaves me dislocated from the "image of God" that is, warts and all, our birthright and nature. But, still, how scary to let that pretense go...
*Smith, H. (1991). The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. Harper Collins, New York, NY. P. 323. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (first paperback edition), Lanham, MD. p. 280-281.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Addendum to "Tolerating the Intolerable" -- Godspell
After I wrote my Sept 5 post, I did more thinking about alternative interpretations of the ending of Godspell. While I am reluctant to interpret too far beyond what the show's creators intended, the modern (electric fence) crucifixion scene still leaves me feeling one can interpret it through the lens of the Holocaust and, even if not explicitly intended, find the questions thus raised provocative and potentially profitable.
I had written that perhaps the occurrence of the Holocaust (and, in general, humanity's repeated plunges into unfathomable evil) is an indictment of Christianity, and that we as Christians should ask ourselves whether two millennia (+/-) of our faith's dominance on the world stage has done us as a species all any good. I still think that's a valid question and, while hoping and believing that the answer is positive for Christianity, it's a question that I propose we should entertain more often than we do.
Another way to look at the symbolism, though, is as a comment on the parallelism of the Jewish and Christian sister religions. Soltes talks of the "relationship between Judaism and Christianity as siblings, children of the same Hebrew-Israelite-Judaean parent, each seeing itself as the legitimate child of that parent and the other as the bastard child."* Huston Smith counters that, at least in modern times, Christians have begun to view their sibling in a different light and recognize "the need for a continuing Jewish presence. Until the world is regenerated, the witness of a nation of priests remains relevant."**
Assuming, with Smith, that God has not been a fan of the primogeniture we two sibling traditions have been trying to assert to each other, it could also be interesting to ask if the play's ending draws an explicit parallel between the passion of Jesus and the Holocaust suffering of the Jewish people.*** However one comes down on the question, I think it might not be so bad to ask if the concept of redemptive suffering is commensurate in the two traditions -- more of a both/and than an either/or? If I were staging the musical, I think I would attempt to draw the parallel even somewhat explicitly, just to get people to consider the possibilities.
Anyway, just another thought...
*Soltes, O. Z. (2009). Mysticism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Searching for Oneness.
** Smith, H. (1991). The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. Harper Collins, New York, NY. P. 323. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (first paperback edition), Lanham, MD. p. 18.
*** In particular, I am following H. Smith's assertion that "the deep meaning the Jews found in their Exile was the meaning of vicarious suffering" (p. 295), and that the traditional Jewish interpretation of Isaiah 53:4-6 ("he was wounded for our transgressions," etc.), where Christians see prophetic foretelling of Jesus' passion, is the that it points to the suffering of the nation of Israel on behalf of the world.
I had written that perhaps the occurrence of the Holocaust (and, in general, humanity's repeated plunges into unfathomable evil) is an indictment of Christianity, and that we as Christians should ask ourselves whether two millennia (+/-) of our faith's dominance on the world stage has done us as a species all any good. I still think that's a valid question and, while hoping and believing that the answer is positive for Christianity, it's a question that I propose we should entertain more often than we do.
Another way to look at the symbolism, though, is as a comment on the parallelism of the Jewish and Christian sister religions. Soltes talks of the "relationship between Judaism and Christianity as siblings, children of the same Hebrew-Israelite-Judaean parent, each seeing itself as the legitimate child of that parent and the other as the bastard child."* Huston Smith counters that, at least in modern times, Christians have begun to view their sibling in a different light and recognize "the need for a continuing Jewish presence. Until the world is regenerated, the witness of a nation of priests remains relevant."**
Assuming, with Smith, that God has not been a fan of the primogeniture we two sibling traditions have been trying to assert to each other, it could also be interesting to ask if the play's ending draws an explicit parallel between the passion of Jesus and the Holocaust suffering of the Jewish people.*** However one comes down on the question, I think it might not be so bad to ask if the concept of redemptive suffering is commensurate in the two traditions -- more of a both/and than an either/or? If I were staging the musical, I think I would attempt to draw the parallel even somewhat explicitly, just to get people to consider the possibilities.
Anyway, just another thought...
*Soltes, O. Z. (2009). Mysticism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Searching for Oneness.
** Smith, H. (1991). The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. Harper Collins, New York, NY. P. 323. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (first paperback edition), Lanham, MD. p. 18.
*** In particular, I am following H. Smith's assertion that "the deep meaning the Jews found in their Exile was the meaning of vicarious suffering" (p. 295), and that the traditional Jewish interpretation of Isaiah 53:4-6 ("he was wounded for our transgressions," etc.), where Christians see prophetic foretelling of Jesus' passion, is the that it points to the suffering of the nation of Israel on behalf of the world.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Tolerating the Intolerable
I'm not yet used to using the Rite One prayers that my little Episcopal Church here in the North Country still follow. Over time, the Episcopal Church has moved theologically to less groveling and more confidence in our public worship. Most of us now stand before God in the prayers and when receiving the Eucharist, instead of kneel in submission. And when we do confess our sins (which may be omitted), we confess only that we have done things we shouldn't and left undone things we should, and that we have not loved with our whole heart. We rarely talk to God anymore about our grievous sins provoking just wrath, much less "bewail" them. I do understand and generally agree with the Gospel of confidence, but I don't know, this week I still can't shake The Ashen Rainbow (Who could? --see my Aug 29 blog), and I wonder if sometimes we aren't just a little too quick to overlook our individual and collective capacity for utter, unqualified evil. What other episode in human history so clearly shows our talent for tolerating the intolerable, looking away when we calculate that the cost of truly seeing is more than we are willing to bear?
I also haven't been able to shake the image from the very end of Godspell where Jesus, who has been crucified on an electric fence is cut down and carried off on a bier to the chorus of "Long Live God." There doesn't seem to be any historical reason to believe that this musical was every associated in anyone's mind with Holocaust Art--nothing I could find, anyway. But the image for me of this buoyant and hopeful musical retelling of the optimism of the Christ story, which culminates with the death and subsequent exit of God on an electric fence, is a apt metaphor for the two millennia Christian experiment culminating with the death of 6 million Jews under the Nazi "final solution."
Before anyone gets too incensed, I realize that the Nazi ideology was thoroughly pagan, and that there were many Christian heroes and Christian martyrs who were engulfed in those years, and that many other groups besides Jews were targeted by the Nazis. I also think that neither God nor society have much need for self-indulgent brow-beating or even much in the way of active response at this point, except that we take up the responsibility for a clear eyed gaze at where we have been and where we might return if we again allow ourselves to cultivate the talent of the incremental tolerance of the intolerable.
But, I do say that thinking Christians would do well to ask ourselves whether this Christian experiment has failed. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were supposed to usher in a new age of the Spirit of God manifest on the earth in the community of the Church, God's new "light to the nations." Surely after a couple thousand years, it's reasonable to take out a tally sheet and ask, "Ok, overall impact: Good or bad? What's our score? Was there really something to this new cult of Jesus?" There is much on the positive side, of course, but there are these troubling little interludes like the Crusades and the Inquisition, for instance, or the subjugation of women, the defense of slavery... And, then, in the case of the Holocaust, there is the little problem of entrenched Christian antisemitism that cannot be explained away. If we sing Ein Feste Burg and take shelter in God's "Mighty Fortress," then we cannot overlook that Martin Luther believed and taught that the Jews are "base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth."* -- This is our Christian lineage; not an aberration, but the natural continuation of centuries of animosity and scapegoating that created a climate in which the utterly unimaginable and intolerable became inescapable history.
At the end of Godspell, Jesus cries out "Oh God, I'm dying" and the chorus answers "Oh God, you're dying." His lifeless body is carried off on the fence from which he was crucified, to the strains of "Long Live God," and a reprise of "Prepare ye the Way of the Lord." I hear the echo of "The King is dead. Long live the King!" and I at least have to ask, what is there to show that Christianity isn't dead and should be supplanted by some new, perhaps less tragically flawed religion? Are we an ultimately failed experiment in living out the incomparable vision of a great prophet who died too soon?
For me, the jury is still out on that question, although, on the other hand, I can bring myself to do nothing other than continue as a Christian. I am too thoroughly culturally grounded in Christian myth, symbolism, language, metaphor -- Christianity is so completely the vehicle that has conveyed me in my struggle to make sense of the world and my place in it that I don't think I could be separated from that identity and still be me. This background is still the filter through which I process and respond to the world. But, in all honesty, I still have to ask... And if, by some great mercy of the God I'm not so sure I still believe, the answer is that Christianity is still viable, then perhaps, on occasion, we would do well to be seriously troubled about the deeds against the "divine Majesty" of God's original chosen people that are on our heads and were (in the sense that we believe we are living members of each other in the community of believers) committed by our own hands:
"We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins
I also haven't been able to shake the image from the very end of Godspell where Jesus, who has been crucified on an electric fence is cut down and carried off on a bier to the chorus of "Long Live God." There doesn't seem to be any historical reason to believe that this musical was every associated in anyone's mind with Holocaust Art--nothing I could find, anyway. But the image for me of this buoyant and hopeful musical retelling of the optimism of the Christ story, which culminates with the death and subsequent exit of God on an electric fence, is a apt metaphor for the two millennia Christian experiment culminating with the death of 6 million Jews under the Nazi "final solution."
Before anyone gets too incensed, I realize that the Nazi ideology was thoroughly pagan, and that there were many Christian heroes and Christian martyrs who were engulfed in those years, and that many other groups besides Jews were targeted by the Nazis. I also think that neither God nor society have much need for self-indulgent brow-beating or even much in the way of active response at this point, except that we take up the responsibility for a clear eyed gaze at where we have been and where we might return if we again allow ourselves to cultivate the talent of the incremental tolerance of the intolerable.
But, I do say that thinking Christians would do well to ask ourselves whether this Christian experiment has failed. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were supposed to usher in a new age of the Spirit of God manifest on the earth in the community of the Church, God's new "light to the nations." Surely after a couple thousand years, it's reasonable to take out a tally sheet and ask, "Ok, overall impact: Good or bad? What's our score? Was there really something to this new cult of Jesus?" There is much on the positive side, of course, but there are these troubling little interludes like the Crusades and the Inquisition, for instance, or the subjugation of women, the defense of slavery... And, then, in the case of the Holocaust, there is the little problem of entrenched Christian antisemitism that cannot be explained away. If we sing Ein Feste Burg and take shelter in God's "Mighty Fortress," then we cannot overlook that Martin Luther believed and taught that the Jews are "base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth."* -- This is our Christian lineage; not an aberration, but the natural continuation of centuries of animosity and scapegoating that created a climate in which the utterly unimaginable and intolerable became inescapable history.
At the end of Godspell, Jesus cries out "Oh God, I'm dying" and the chorus answers "Oh God, you're dying." His lifeless body is carried off on the fence from which he was crucified, to the strains of "Long Live God," and a reprise of "Prepare ye the Way of the Lord." I hear the echo of "The King is dead. Long live the King!" and I at least have to ask, what is there to show that Christianity isn't dead and should be supplanted by some new, perhaps less tragically flawed religion? Are we an ultimately failed experiment in living out the incomparable vision of a great prophet who died too soon?
For me, the jury is still out on that question, although, on the other hand, I can bring myself to do nothing other than continue as a Christian. I am too thoroughly culturally grounded in Christian myth, symbolism, language, metaphor -- Christianity is so completely the vehicle that has conveyed me in my struggle to make sense of the world and my place in it that I don't think I could be separated from that identity and still be me. This background is still the filter through which I process and respond to the world. But, in all honesty, I still have to ask... And if, by some great mercy of the God I'm not so sure I still believe, the answer is that Christianity is still viable, then perhaps, on occasion, we would do well to be seriously troubled about the deeds against the "divine Majesty" of God's original chosen people that are on our heads and were (in the sense that we believe we are living members of each other in the community of believers) committed by our own hands:
"We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins
and wickedness,
which we from time to time most grievously have committed,
by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty,
provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.
We do earnestly repent,
and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings;
the remembrance of them is grievous unto us,
the burden of them is intolerable.
Have mercy upon us!"
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