"The measure of what we shall do to men cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us.  For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong, and our foolishness more than our wisdom.  This is the limit of the Golden Rule.  This is the limit of calculating justice.  Only for him who knows what he should wish and who actually wishes it , is the Golden Rule ultimately valid.  Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice.  Love makes justice just.  Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet.  For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are a unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love.  If this call is not heard by listening love, if it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself.  He who loves listens to the call of his own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to his own being... But we speak for a love in which justice is the form and the structure of love.  We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what he is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons.  Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which love unites.  Love makes justice just."

-Paul Tillich, The New Being, 32-33.

"He 'prays without ceasing' who joins prayer to works that are of obligation, and good works to his prayer.  For virtuous works, or the carrying out of what is enjoined, form part of prayer.  It is only in this way that we can understand the injunction, 'pray without ceasing,' as something that we can carry out; that is to say, if we regard the whole life of the saint as one great continuous prayer."

-Origen, "Prayer"

Lent 2012

It's probably due to my liturgy-deprived childhood that critical dates of the Church calendar tend to sneak up on me.  And, for that same reason, I get excited about these moments in the life of the Church.  As much as I am devoted to the faith, I find myself stumbling through the ecclesial calendar and the liturgical movements of the Church life which I encounter when I attend the local Episcopal church.  When I [recently] realized that Lent is approaching, I began to look forward to this time of reflection and journeying with Christ.

The Lenten season reminds us of the sufferings of Christ.  Unfortunately, the fascination with Jesus' sufferings have lead to masochistic tendencies, to passivity in the face of abuse and injustice, and, sometimes, toward self-destructive behavior.  Glorifying the abuse and death of a peasant by the hands of a strong power (in this case, the state), has become a commodity of piety that appeals mainly to those all too familiar with privilege.  That's to say, it's easy to romanticize and to sanctify suffering if it isn't part of one's daily existence.  I'd argue that this has left a stain of morbidity and life-denying piety on the Christian tradition.  And, for this reason, themes that regard Jesus' sufferings as "redemptive" have come under heavy criticism by feminist and liberation theologians (and rightly so!).  But lately, I've struggled to find renewed significance in the sufferings and the death of Christ and, thereby, also significance in Christ's body.  I wonder how we can understand the sufferings and the death Christ without romanticizing the pain and injustice felt by the most vulnerable of our world?  Can we truly find hope and life in the midst of despair?  Is there an affirmation of life in this story about injustice and violent death?  I find this moment in our Christian story profound and perplexing, rich and embarrassing, magnificent and offensive, yet I think my faith is forged in wrestling with it rather than passively accepting it.  During this Lenten season, I hope to spend time contemplating this twisted and strange moment at the heart of our faith--to find new life when "God-with-us" gave up his.

Love and Julian of Norwich

What I find most profound about Julian of Norwich is that, for her, the Christian life is located in the body.  She speaks about the Passion of Christ with the greatest attention to his humanity--his wounds, his dried skin, and his bloodless body--and the boundless love that moved him to suffer.  However, she also speaks about her own body participating in being both wounded and overcome with love, even being wounded with love.  For Julian, divine love is a love that causes and transforms the suffering of our physical bodies.

Yet, how can I read these themes of love and suffering, desire and pain made evident in the physical body without being reminded of sexuality (or maybe I'm just perverted)?  Her writings reflect the experiences of sexual encounters and fantasizes, of sorrow and unrequited infatuations, and of torturous masochistic pleasures.  However, they also resonate with our experience of limitation and breaking down--that is, of illness and of disability.  For those of us who are acutely aware of our sexuality through being sexual minorities or of our bodies through disability or ailment, Julian is wonderfully affirming.  It's no easy task to embrace our diverse bodies in affirming love in a world that judges our bodies based on skin color, ability, weight, breast size, and form.  Moreover, in our culture, our bodies are often times ignored (consider the hours spent in cars, at our desk, and by the computer/TV) and feared (the fear of death, of aging, and of disability).  But, when I read Julian, I cannot help but be returned to my very mortal existence with all of its frailty, boundaries, and passions and, there, to find God's love at work.  In our grief, joy, pain, and wounds our very bodies are joined to Christ's body who's wounds are also the opening of an unending love.  And in being to joined to Christ's wounds--thereby embracing our own mortal lives--there is no greater heaven.

"With a kindly countenance our good Lord looked into his side, and he gazed with joy, and with his sweet regard he drew his creature's understanding into his side by the same wound; and there he revealed a fair and delectable place, large enough for all mankind that will be saved and will rest in peace and in love. And with that he brought to mind the dear and precious blood and water which he suffered to be shed for love. And in this sweet sight he showed his blessed heart split in two, and as he rejoiced he showed to my understanding a part of his blessed divinity, as much as was his will at that time, strengthening my poor soul to understand what can be said, that is the endless love which was without beginning and is and always shall be."

- Julian of Norwich, Showings (Long text), Twenty Fourth Chapter.

The Joy of Being Wrong by James Alison

Book recommendation:  The Joy of Being Wrong by James Alison.  Once the opening pages grabbed me, it didn't take me too long to burn through this one.  In this book, Alison relies on René Girard's theories of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism to shine new light on the New Testament witness.  His most important contribution through this book is his insistence that theology must begin with the Resurrection of Christ, which is the key to understanding salvation, theological anthropology, and original sin.  Not only is the resurrection the moment when our salvation is revealed, but it's also the moment when our sin is made known, as well.  In being forgiven, that which we are being forgiven of is made known, namely, our complicity in violence and exclusion.  Though I cringed at a few places throughout this work, the insights offered are very rich and well worth the journey.

"Al human sociality is born thanks to the victim, and particularly, to ignorance of the victim(s) that gave it birth.  Human language and thought are already utterly inflected by this ur-violence from their conception."

-James Allison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 16.

"The risen Jesus did not need to say to those who had run away, 'I forgive you': his presence to them was a forgiving presence, was forgiveneness as a person.  So in Luke and John he gives them power and commands them to forgive others as the way of spreading this presence dynamically in human form.  To the disciples themselves the very fact of his gratuitous presence was forgiveness."

-James Allison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 75.

"Sin is recast entirely in the light of the casting out of Jesus... Sin is revealed a the mechanicism of expulsion which is murderous, and those are blind sinners who are involved in that mechanism without being aware of what they're doing."

-James Allison, The Joy of Being Wrong, 122.

Eros and Pseudo-Dionysius

I am moved when I read the great Christian theologian, Pseudo-Dionysius.  For him God is the transcendent and overflowing Good which surpasses all intelligibility and form--even surpassing Being-itself.  The Good is the source of all things, gives light to all, and sets all things in motion with erotic (yes, erotic!) yearning for the Good.  I find the lure of Pseudo-Dionysius in this:  rather than seeing the universe as simply ordered by static forms, or as governed by cold rationality and mechanic movement, or as a threatening chaos that has to be mastered (for example, consider the modernity), Pseudo-Dionysius sees the entire universe as fundamentally erotic--propelled and drawn by superabundant desire that overflows to beings and non-beings alike.

Pseudo-Dionysius is adamant that all things in the universe (celestial, human, inanimate and otherwise) are moved by God to desire and all things desire God.  Then, bucking against his Neoplatonic inclinations, the theologian affirms that, in God's excess, God erotically yearns for all things.  Then, he takes yet another step to assert that God is not only the foundation and the object of our desire, but God is desire itself in motion.  We don't have to accept all the Neoplatonic trappings to benefit from this joyous and erotic theology.

"And we may be so bold as to claim also that the Cause of all things loves all things in the superabundance of his goodness, that because of this goodness he makes all things, brings all things to perfection, holds all things together, returns all things.  The divine longing is Good seeking good for the sake of the Good.  That yearning (eros) which creates all the goodness of the world preexisted superabundantly within the Good and did not allow it to remain without issue."

-Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, Ch. 4.10

"This divine yearning (eros) brings ecstasy so that the lover belongs not to self but to the beloved... And, in truth, it must be said too that the very cause of the universe in the beautiful, good superabundance of his benign yearning for all is also carried outside of himself in the loving care he has for everything.  He is, as it were, beguiled by goodness, by love, and by yearning and is enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself... In short, both the yearning and the object of that yearning belong to the Beautiful and the Good."

-Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, Ch. 4.13

"He is yearning on the move, simple, self-moved, self-acting, preexistent in the Good, flowing out from the Good onto all that is and returning once again to the Good."

-Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, Ch. 4.14