I will be speaking for the first of a weekend full of graduations services at La Sierra University tonight (June 14, 2013) at 8:00 pm PDT. This is the Consecreation service and will be held in the La Sierra University Church. I hope you can join us.
If you'd like to watch LIVE online, click here to go to their live feed at 8:00 pm PDT.
Cross-posted from The Hillhurst Review
Affliction, says Jewish-Christian mystic, Simone Weil, is like a nail being driven into a piece of wood: it brings the one whose orientation is to love, into the very presence of God.
Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul, and social degradation, all at the same time, is a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity spreading throughout space and time.[1]
Weil makes a categorical distinction between suffering and malheur, which can be translated “misfortune,” “tragedy” or, as most of Weil’s translators render it, “affliction.” In English, affliction carries the meaning of persistent distress or pain, such as disease. Weil infuses this word with a sense of inevitability and dread; a kind of ‘dark night of the soul’ which goes beyond, but includes, physical and emotional suffering.
What is remarkable about Weil, and others like her, is her ability to understand suffering without the imposed moralism that typically goes with it. She saw affliction as both a function of necessity and chance. Necessity, in the sense that affliction is part of the normal order of things and thus inescapable, let alone surprising. Chance, in that affliction does not have a moral valence. It is random and not necessarily related to the sin of the one being afflicted.
Speaking about suffering is a challenging thing. The minute you attempt to explain it you risk glorifying or justifying it in some way; minimizing the horror. I respond negatively to any notion of determinism, and Weil’s philosophy of affliction comes close to this, as she describes nature and matter simply being obedient to God. She writes:
All the horrors produced in this world are like the folds imposed upon the waves by gravity. That is why they contain an element of beauty.
I rebel: suffering is not beautiful! And yet the experience of two World Wars must certainly have inoculated Weil against glib expressions of suffering’s beauty. So I begin to examine my own biases and realize once again that I am accustomed to the world bending to my will. I am, after all, a white American male. Determinism or fate has no part in my philosophical framework. The world is malleable. It is what I make it, or so I’ve been taught.
In addition I must grapple with her other statements about affliction, like this one:
Affliction renders God absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than the light in a completely dark cell. A sort of horror submerges the whole soul. During this absence there is nothing to love. What is terrible is that in this darkness where there is nothing to love, if the soul ceases to love, the absence of God becomes final. The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least to go on wanting to love, though it may only be with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then, one day, God will come to show himself to this soul and to reveal the beauty of the world to it, as in the case of Job. But if the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to hell.
Suffering is certainly not romantic or beautiful in the shallow sense but there is, potentially, something at work that keeps it from being absolutely meaningless, as it so often appears in my own experience. I understand all too well the darkness of God’s devastating absence in which “there is nothing to love.” Here Weil even admits that loving is not necessary. Perhaps even “wanting to love…with an infinitesimal part of itself” is enough. This reminds me of the cry of the father of a tormented son, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). Loving in the emptiness. It is a challenge but it is not impossible. It is not like believing in the emptiness, or hoping against hope. We can chose to love. To act from love. And when we do, something remarkable is made possible. Her essay ends with these remarkable words.
Affliction is a marvel of divine technique. It is a simple and ingenious device which introduces into the soul of a finite creature the immensity of force, blind, brutal, and cold. The infinite distance separating God from the creature is entirely concentrated into one point to pierce the soul in its center.
The man to whom such a thing happens has no part in the operation. He struggles like a butterfly pinned alive into an album. But through all the horror he can continue to want to love. There is nothing impossible in that, no obstacle, one might almost say no difficulty. For the greatest suffering, so long as it does not cause the soul to faint, does not touch the acquiescent part of the soul, consenting to a right direction.
It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction.
He whose soul remains ever turned toward God, though the nail pierces, he finds himself nailed to the very center of the universe. It is the true center; it is not in the middle; it is beyond space and time; it is God. In a dimension that does not belong to space, that is not time, that is indeed quite a different dimension, this nail has pierced cleanly through all creation, through the thickness of the screen separating the soul from God.
In this marvelous dimension, the soul, without leaving the place and the instant where the body to which it is united is situated, can cross the totality of space and time and come into the very presence of God.
It is at the intersection of creation and its Creator. This point of intersection is the point of intersection of the arms of the Cross.
Weil’s words are terrifyingly vivid and resonate: “like a butterfly pinned alive into an album.” And, in a sort of dénouement to her argument, she speaks of being “nailed to the center of the universe.” Never before has anyone made being nailed to anything sound appealing. Until now.
For the soul that remains oriented toward God—that is, oriented toward love, which throughout her essay is the very definition of God—there remains the possibility of entering the very presence of God. Affliction is the way. Actually, love is the way. Affliction is simply the (un)usual occasion for the sort of love that pierces the veil separating us from God.
Those who are in the thick of affliction, who feel that a nail has pierced not only their body but also their soul are more likely to think of it as meaningless, but even the famous existentialist, Søren Kierkegaard, wrote,
“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ – that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”
As I attempt to sort through the seeming meaninglessness and confusion of my own life experience I am encouraged to press deeper into the despair that threatens, at times, to swallow me alive. I am challenged by Simone Weil, Søren Kierkegaard, and others, to stare into the abyss until my eyes begin to adjust, until the darkness becomes a new kind of light.
I am reminded once again that suffering—or affliction—is not the thing, but love. When all else seems impossible, and there is nothing to love in the face of God’s absence, “soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least to go on wanting to love” or risk falling “into something almost equivalent to hell.”
[1] All quotes from Simone Weil are from her essay, “The Love of God and Affliction” in Simone Weil, Awaiting God (Abbotsford, BC: Fresh Wind Press, 2012).
The new documentary, The Way of Openness, is now online at the website, Beyond Prop 8 LA. It's a short film, at 22 minutes, and features me in conversation with other religious leaders from around Los Angeles talking about Proposition 8 from within our religious traditions and what the debate has meant for our communities.
And if you live in Los Angeles, I would love to have you join us on Tuesday evening, March 19, at the beautiful Barnsdall Gallery Theater, for a special screening followed by conversation with those of us in the film. For more information see the flyer below or visit www.beyondprop8la.org!
(click image to enlarge)
If you live in Los Angeles, tune in or set your DVR to record The Way of Openness, a new documentary produced by the City of Los Angeles Human Relationship Commission. If you don't get Channel 35 or live in Los Angeles there are two other options:
1. You can watch online live at www.lacityview.org
2. You can wait a bit longer and see the film in its entirety online. Stay tuned for more details.
I am a
fan of Karl Marx's critique of religion as "the opium of the people." Because Marx is the most famous atheist and hostile toward religion, religious people rarely give his critique a chance. We need to listen to what Marx has to say. I refer to this quite often in my messages at the Hollywood Adventist Church.
Haven't you noticed that religion mostly pacifies people? It mostly leads them to disengage with the world and to wish for a world that doesn't exist. What I am working toward in my congregation is a religious faith that motivates people to act. But this is not how we have been taught. Those of us who have grown up Christian—especially, but not only, those in the conservative/evangelical side of the church—have learned, more or less, that Jesus died for our sins, freed us from existential guilt, and accepted us into his family. What remains is to wait for the full consumation of that freedom in heaven or a world made new. The most we might be motived to do, if we are extroverted and altruistic enough, is invite others to to follow us on this path.
In this mode, Christianity is primarily about keeping your nose clean and waiting out this cruel world as we wait for something better to be ushered in by God. This is a religion of disengagement, of passivity and of apathy and Marx was right to criticize it.
Here is a longer section that includes the famous "opium" line, from, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.
You need to be sober to deal with life as it is. In fact, the principalities and powers thrive when those who properly have a vision of the world as it should be are so inebriated by religion as to be of no good to the world. This religion must die, and soon.
My friend, Peter Rollins, is talking about this in his recent conversation with the good folks at Work of the People. Listen as he describes what he calls Crack House Church.
To what extent is your church a Crack House Church?
What can we do to sober people up so that they can feel and engage with the world as it is and work as God's partners to create the world as it should be?
Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all,if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it get much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that save everything.
Continue reading "Thomas Merton | Letter to a Young Activist" »
I recently had a very short essay published in the International Journal of Public Theology (Brill: 6, 2012). It's entitled "This Is My Father's World" and deals with the challenge of eschatology for faith-based community organizing. It appears together with three other essays by my esteemed colleagues: Patty Daley (IAF), Anthony Banout (formerly of Gamaliel, now with the Interfaith Youth Core), and Jonathan Curie (International Worker Justice).
Leaders In Faith-Based Organizing Networks
--------
The terms of the copyright permit me to post this here on my own personal website. Please enjoy for your own personal reading but do not duplicate or distrubite without permission from the Brill.
The following are my comments from Under the Holly, a community holiday party put on by my friend, Nathan French, to raise money for two organizations that support the homeless in Los Angeles.
Every year, around Thanksgiving, with an apparent lack of more important issues to discuss, the mainstream news media—if one can still refer to Fox News as mainstream news—revives the old cold war.
Not that Cold War, of course. The fear today is not of communists infiltrating our society to take away what we hold most dear: our freedoms and our way of life (though the fear is not dissimilar to the more recent iteration). I’m talking about…
The War on Christmas
If you didn’t know better you might think this “war” was a modern-day Dickensian Ebenezer Scrooge story or a real life Grinch who “stole Christmas”—ironically, both cautionary tales about coldheartedness toward others—especially those in need—and general meanness resulting from personal loss and deep loneliness.
As a Christian minister who counts the Christmas story among the two most important stories in the Bible, I have a couple of thoughts about this “war.”
First of all, I think Christmas can stand up to the challenge of pluralism—of people who don’t happen to hold the Christmas story as formative in the same way I do. The story of Christmas is not so fragile, I don’t think. Hanukkah has never enjoyed cultural dominance and the celebration seems to being doing just fine. I don’t need to see a nativity scene on the grounds of City Hall to prop up my faith in God or my confidence in the central message of the Christmas story (more on that central message in a moment).
Secondly, if there is any violence done to Christmas I'm concerned it comes primarily from within the community of Christmas observers. The greatest risk to Christmas—and what Christmas might mean as a public good—is not in failing to say “Merry Christmas” or to put a nativity scene on public property.
It comes from getting the story wrong.
Is there a way that the Christmas story could be a public good? I think there is, and it’s found in the details of the story itself.
To wit…
Jesus was born to peasant parents at a time of economic oppression. The reason Jesus’ folks were in Bethlehem and not their hometown of Nazareth when the auspicious moment arrived was that the Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus, had called for every person in the realm to be registered and taxed. The first of the Caesars to fancy himself a "Son of the Gods," Augustus wanted to consolidate his power and wealth.
Joseph and Mary head out for Bethlehem, some 80 miles to the south. If they could travel at 20 miles per day, which might be a challenge given Mary’s very pregnant condition, they could make the trip in 4 days.
And then there are the circumstances of Mary’s pregnancy—very suspicious. Honestly, who is buying the story of Mary being empregnated by the Spirit of God?
This is not a good time. Jesus’ birth is clouded by imperial occupation, economic hardship, and social shame. Not only this but when King Herod of Judea hears about a so-called king being born in Bethlehem in fulfillment of some ancient prophecies, his pathology is aroused, and he orders all the babies two years old and under to be executed. So, add politically motivated violence to the list of horrors surrounding Jesus’ birth. Mary, Joseph and the newborn Jesus narrowly escape from this infanticide as refuges to Egypt for a number of years.
As sentimental as we Christians can often get around Christmas, the actual story is harrowing. It is a story of the underclass being oppressed by the Empire.
Jesus then lives out his adult life as a friend of every type of oppressed, poor and outcast person. Finally...
----SPOILER ALERT----
...he is tracked down and murdered by the Roman Empire.
For Christians, the Christmas story means one thing: God has come to be with us. So the real war on Christmas, it seems to me, is distracting the world with questions of political correctness while we let the poor, sick and cast aside suffer under a similar imperial oppression. How God choses turn up in human history reveals so much about God's character and priorities.
It seems to me that those who would use the Christmas story as cover for their political agenda and to protect their middle class, Anglo-Saxon, privilege are waging the real war on Christmas.
The fact that we can deny DREAMers the chance to become citizens, in the name of a Palestinian refugee who was, himself, an immigrant, is the real war on Christmas.
That we could use Christmas as a source of cultural division when in the Biblical tradition Jesus was visited in that lowly stable by three wisdom teachers from the East is the real war on Christmas. The Christian tradition says that these three were an Indian, a Persian and an Arab (in the memorable words of that Jewish Scholar, Adam Sandler, “Not a Jew”).
So the visit of the three so-called Kings from the East makes the birth of Jesus a profoundly interfaith event indicating from the beginning that God did not send Jesus as a sectarian savior, but as someone who would love and seek the redemption of the whole world.
In the Christmas story, God identifies with the poor, the occupied, the refuge, the immigrant. It matters little whether you believe Jesus was immaculately conceived, or born to a literal virgin. It's not vital that you solve the riddle of whether and how Jesus is God in human flesh.
The important thing to experience for all of us, whether we think of ourselves as followers of Jesus or not, is the hope that the story of Jesus might inspire; that good could triumph over evil, that love wins in the end, that goodness and generosity, not greed and violence would have the last word.
Izzeldin Abuelaish: I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
Daniel Izuzquiza: Rooted in Jesus Christ: Towards a Radical Ecclesiology
Graham Cray: Disciples and Citizens: A Vision for Distinctive Living
N. T. Wright: After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters
Paulo Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition
Samir Selmanovic: It's Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian
Jim Belcher: Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional
Steve Lopez: The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music
Recent Comments