Liturgy of destruction and double desecration

Yes, I know, the above title probably names two existing death metal hits ;-)  Actually, the phrase "liturgy of destruction" came to me in a discussion of the title of the Book of Revelation a.k.a. the Apocalypse.  A lot of this book describes a heavenly liturgy: the Redeemer in priestly vestments surrounded by lampstands, thurifer angels offering up incense, readings (from a scroll nobody but the priestly Redeemer can read) and crowds of various sentient beings worshiping and singing hymns.  Even the large chunks of the work dealing with the destruction of everybody-we-don't-like have a liturgical flavor: seven seals, trumpets, and bowls mark out different torments. 

A search for "liturgy of destruction" surprisingly turned up not death metal album covers, but the distinctly more serious topic of the Holocaust (itself a strikingly liturgical metaphor) and other pogroms.  Google found me a page from a book: "Against the apocalypse: responses to catastrophe in modern Jewish culture," by David G. Roskies.  I was struck by the following description (p. 16) of the desecration of a synagogue by a Russian army in 1917:

When my eye caught sight of the eastern wall, I was totally shaken by what I saw.  The elaborate ornamentation on the ark, including the ten commandments up above, was left intact.  But in the middle of the empty ark itself a huge [Eastern Orthodox] icon [of Jesus] had been placed.

Tselem baheykhal, "an idol in the sanctuary," flashed through my mind.  And this shocked me more than all the pogroms I had witnessed.  An ancient response began to awaken within me, an echo of the destruction of the Temple... I felt that a terrible sacrilege had been perpetrated here, a desecration of both religions.  The brutal hand of a soldier run wild had exacted the same reprisal from God as from man.

The "double desecration" here stood out: the unknown vandals, violently subverting the Face of the Christ as a racial and political statement, desecrated it as much as the Jewish sanctuary.   It was after reading this, that I saw the following news story about some hateful locals in Phoenix, AZ who were protesting what they thought was a mosque under construction.  We laugh, because the supposed mosque was really just a dome for some Christian church, but the same double desecration stands out:  Jesus' Cross, Face, and Name subverted for racial and political ends, insulting Christianity itself along with Islam.  Wikipedia's article on the 1819 "Hep-Hep" riots has a fitting quote by Rahel Varnhagen: "Their hate does not stem from religious zeal: how can they hate other faiths when they don't even love their own?"

Covering the statues

Today is Passion Sunday in the traditional Latin Rite, and I noticed that our parish follows the venerable tradition of covering the representations of the Crucifix, of Jesus and of other holy figures with a purple cloth, from today until the Easter Vigil.  It seems contradictory at first to conceal the signs of the Passion during the very time in which we commemorate it, not only in the liturgy but also in devotional practices, such as watching Passion plays and films, or praying the Stations of the Cross. Of course, it makes sense to remind ourselves that Jesus was "taken from us," that human power and fear occulted God.  Jesus himself experienced that occultation; as a churchgoer described to me today, bearing the full burden of sin on his human body brought about such a deep contradiction between the divine and human natures that it could only mean death for the One bearing it.  In covering the statues, we remind ourselves that the "real" Passion was as much about the inner experience of abandonment and spiritual deprivation, as it was about physical suffering and death.

Every year, Lent is a great burden to me.  Perhaps this is because I wore myself out from many years of harsh devotional practices and unreflected beliefs when I was younger.  Even then, my "hard on myself" wasn't really:  I couldn't take fasting without getting dizzy and fainting, for example.  But in some sense, this kind of Lent -- fasts and haircloth and vigils and "let's increase our self-hatred by watching Jesus getting beaten up" -- is like the statues before they are covered.  It's a way to "do something," to make oneself feel holy.  Like jogging or going on a diet is healthy for one's body, ascetic and devotional practices can be healthy and good for the soul.  Nevertheless, just as healthy diet doesn't always prevent illness, prayer and self-deprivation don't always protect one from the "shadow of death" (today's Tract was from Ps. 23), that is, the experience of separation from God.  Just as sickness is more painful for a generally healthy person, deprivation of Divine light is yet more painful for someone who once knew God, or felt as if she had known God.  How much easier it would be if one had no experience of God whatsoever!  But this is not how things are. 

Act and Intention

Last week, we were idly watching a television program called "Ghost Adventures." In each episode, a crew of three is locked inside a place purported to be haunted, and they attempt to document visual and auditory supernatural phenomena. In the program we watched, the three visited a nightclub widely considered the residence of demons, and taunted them in order to evoke a manifestation (with apparent success). (The episode wisely included some footage of an Old Catholic exorcist bishop in Kentucky chastising the show's host for his foolhardiness, and explaining that the real threat posed by demons is not physical but spiritual.)

What I'm writing about is not whether or not taunting demons is a bad idea (you can judge for yourself!), but something that the host briefly said during the crew's "lockdown" in the haunted basement. They were in a room purported to have housed satanic rituals. The host lit some candles, and arranged them in a circle, asking a crew member to sit there and watch for possible phenomena. However, the host was careful to state as he placed the candles that the circle was randomly arranged and was not meant as "a satanic ritual or anything like that."

The host's phrase irritated me at first, because the practice of casting a circle occurs commonly in many forms of ritual magic and has nothing necessarily to do with "devil worship." (Presumably the connection has to do with figures like Aleister Crowley, along with the usual misunderstandings about non-Christian religious practices.) However, the Gospel reading this Sunday (23th Sunday after Pentecost) put the host's saying in perspective. The reading was Matthew 9:18-26, in particular the cure of the woman suffering hemorrhages. I was reminded of Mark's account of the same episode:

There was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years. She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and had spent all that she had. Yet she was not helped but only grew worse. She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak. She said, "If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured." Immediately her flow of blood dried up. She felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction. Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him, turned around in the crowd and asked, "Who has touched my clothes?" But his disciples said to him, "You see how the crowd is pressing upon you, and yet you ask, 'Who touched me?'" And he looked around to see who had done it. The woman, realizing what had happened to her, approached in fear and trembling. She fell down before Jesus and told him the whole truth. He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your affliction."

I like Mark's version better both because it's more touching (you hear more of the woman's story) and because it's more "raw" than Matthew's account. Mark tells an interesting detail about Jesus' reaction to the woman's touch: he asks, "Who touched me?", even though he is in the middle of a crowd pressing on him from all sides. Imagine asking "who touched me?" in the middle of Times Square at rush hour! However, in a crowd, the act of touching is generally intentionless, or rather a byproduct of unrelated intention: I want to get close enough to have a good look at this Jesus guy, or I'm trying to push through this annoying crowd to buy some groceries from the market, or I'm just caught in the middle and trying to figure out what's going on. In contrast, the suffering woman touches Jesus with fully deliberate intent: "If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured." Jesus in turn responds not to the act of touching, but to the intentional act, the act combined with deliberate intent.

This helped me understand why the host of "Ghost Adventures" might have said what he did. He was in a room where he thought satanic rituals might have been held (a "ritually and supernaturally charged space"), and doing something that he considered charged with spiritual significance (putting candles in a circle around someone). Therefore, he thought it necessary to announce his intent: the arrangement was "random" and "not a satanic ritual." The phenomenon resembles something that a Catholic priest once mentioned regarding the Consecration: at times, it would be necessary to consecrate bread and wine not on the physical altar in front of him, so he would consecrate with the intention to include a particular physical space. He didn't use these terms, but one could say that Eucharistic consecration normally includes an "implicit intention" (i.e., "the bread and wine on the altar in front of me"), but may also include an "explicit intention" which covers unusual circumstances. (Say the priest has to say Mass in a bread factory on a table made of stacked-up full wine bottles: the priest might want to make an explicit intention only to consecrate the elements meant for the sacrifice, and not the surrounding bread or wine.)

Jesus' sensitivity to human intention meant that he could tell the difference between accidental touch and meaningful touch. What's most interesting, however, is that Jesus doesn't even seem to know who touched him, until the woman identifies herself. It's as if her faith alone effects the cure: "Daughter, your faith has saved you." This shows the power of intention in the supernatural world. One could say that the only effects there are willed effects: there is no accident.

Asking questions

A couple days ago, I was flipping through Thomas Merton's little pamphlet on how to approach Scripture. He pointed out an example of the typical master-disciple exchange in Zen Buddhism: the disciple asks, "Who is the Buddha?", and the master replies, "Who are you?" The surface interpretation of this dialog is that you are the Buddha and I am the Buddha and everybody is the Buddha so let's all be happy hippies all together now. Merton explains it in a different way: the disciple goes to the master looking for facts, for doctrine to fill in the blanks in her spiritual worksheet. In reply, the master offers a question instead of an answer. Knowledge of the Buddha is not doctrine but experience, and therefore it requires a process of internal reflection and self-discovery ("Who are you?").

Interpreted a different way, this is what good advisors do with their students. If the answer to a question is known, it can be found in some journal paper or textbook. Instead, good advisors offer questions, because the process of scientific insight and discovery cannot begin without a good question. Long experience in a field develops the ability to ask the right questions, rather than the ability to accumulate knowledge. (Perhaps this is why among professors, good lecturers are much harder to find than good researchers!)

Bio of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin: following Beatrice?

Last weekend, while traveling, I read a biography of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin by Mary Lukas and Ellen Lukas. It reads much like one would expect from a biography written by journalists in 1977: a lot of chronology, some of it not particularly interesting, and some sympathy. I've been dipping into "The Human Phenomenon" (formerly known as "The Phenomenon of Man") in a new translation, and finding it very insightful. Unfortunately, that kind of book is impossible to read in short bursts (for me at least!), so I have trouble making progress.

I learned two surprising things about the good Father from the biography. The first is his apparent failure to learn anything from China about humanity, after having spent so many years there. He observed the lack of interest in spiritual matters of ordinary Chinese people, and found it alien and disconcerting. The almost self-annihilating spiritual drive of many Hindus in India, in contrast, gave him a reference point against which he could argue: it said (according to him) that "matter is bad," whereas he said "matter is good." It didn't seem to occur to Teilhard to try to account for a cultural disinterest in "spiritualization" in his views on human development.

The second thing I learned was that Teilhard also had something to say about noncorporeal "sex magick," a topic which I've discussed on this blog before. The biographers considered Teilhard's work "The Evolution of Chastity" as mainly a reflection on his personal situation with Lucile Swan -- a woman with whom he carried on a long-term platonic relationship. What's interesting about the work is that he comes to many of the same conclusions as did Charles Williams and other male authors: from the male perspective, heterosexual expression should or will evolve away from the physical and towards the spiritual.

As I read this passage in the biography, it occurred to me that Teilhard, along with other male authors who had expressed these views, was making an implicit assumption of causality. We observe this: Men often experience "the feminine" as diffuse, rather than strongly individuated. These authors seem to associate diffuseness with abstraction, and like Plato, abstraction with moral elevation. By abstracting one's relationships, they seem to say, one can reach upwards towards "das Ewig-Weibliche," or "Yin," or whatever one chooses to call the Platonic form of Womanhood. They seem to neglect another explanation of the above observation: men could experience the feminine as diffuse, simply because the human male tends towards polygamy or polyamory. Men -- perhaps some more than others -- must consciously choose to make their experience of Womanhood concrete and singular.

It's interesting that men like Charles Williams and Teilhard felt how they did for women who were outside lawful monogamous bounds: CW, for one not his wife (Phyllis Jones), and Teilhard, despite his vow of celibacy, for an arguably spoiled dilettante artist with a childish fascination for the mysterious French Jesuit. Were CW and Teilhard projecting their diffuse desires onto their metaphysics? I shouldn't speculate into their motives, and I should also point out that both relationships were resolved with moral uprightness. Fr. Teilhard also was close friends with Lucile Swan at times when he had little support and needed a lot of friendship and love. Rather than judging these men harshly, we should look into the phenomenon itself and try to understand why they saw the direction of causality pointing one way instead of another.

The dreadful process of self-deception

I was reading an article in Rolling Stone linked from BoingBoing, called "Jesus Made Me Puke." It's easy to expect just sheer (though deserved) mockery from such an article (in which a reporter infiltrates a fundamentalist Christian weekend retreat and tells all), but he makes a valuable point in a couple of paragraphs:

After two days of nearly constant religious instruction, songs, worship and praise — two days that for me meant an unending regimen of forced and fake responses — a funny thing started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you're a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene — even if you're intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal-ambition case like Phil Fortenberry — outwardly you're swaying to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that "inner you" begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest — in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the "work" of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?

He goes on to say,

For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your "sinful" self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath.

What's startling here is the vast capacity of the human person for self-deception, not necessarily even as a deliberate act, but merely as a weary, gradual assent to external pressure -- a pressure which is applied by a vast crowd of those who are going through the process of self-deception themselves. It's easy for us educated, sophisticated, BoingBoing and Rolling Stone - reading types to push these "middle America fundies" to the margins of our perception, but hard to realize that at the very root, there's surprisingly little difference between them and us.

I discovered this most recently when observing how many vocal Hollywood stars and activists in the West reacted to the recent troubles in Tibet. It was very easy for them to shout condemnations, but I didn't see any of them examine the real reasons behind this particular incident, or question why they should support this particular cause. The trouble was not with the expression of personal opinion, but with the lack of intellectual justification for these opinions. Why should Tibet be "free"? Who wants to support (financially and militarily) a "free Tibet" once it exists? What happens if we base national sovereignty on ethnicity? Why should we pay attention to some faraway land in another faraway country's possession when we have our own darker history (and arguably, present) of oppression and marginalization of Native Americans at home?

The Tibet incident was distressing for me, much like the Rolling Stone reporter was distressed to find himself swaying to the "Praise & Worship" band. I had been involved in protests against the (second) Iraq War, and had considered my "side" somewhat more enlightened than the other. Yet, with the recent Tibet issue, I found a lot of people on "my side" doing something perhaps equally ill-conceived and unreflective, and the "thugs and goons" on the other side actually for once not. It was a painful reality check to realize that otherwise educated and fairly intelligent people could close their eyes to any information that opposes their views, just as the other supposedly ignorant and low-born people had done before. (Doesn't the constant mockery of "middle America" sound a lot like bourgeois derision of the peasant class? Recall that the word "boor" shares a root with "Bauer," the German word for "farmer.")

A big part of this process of self-deception must be the "mass effect," which is what the Rolling Stone reporter feels. If he had been alone in an auditorium with the preacher for the whole weekend, he probably wouldn't have been able to carry on with his facade for very long. If I spend all of my time hanging out with pro-Tibet protesters, then it will generate in me a community mentality that makes it hard for opposing information to penetrate. Likewise, if I only hang around with pro-China protesters (there are such people, and large numbers of them!), I'll start to see China as "my team" and will have a hard time accepting opposing news.

The most distressing part (here's where I go a little bit Kierkegaard) is that even if I don't join a group, even if I deliberately spurn groups so as to gain a supposedly more objective and elevated viewpoint, I am still quite capable of self-deception. The very claim of objectivity is itself subjective. It's impossible to avoid influencing the world economy, because even if you strip off all products of civilization and run naked into the forest to forage for nuts and berries, you're _not_ buying some article of clothing sewn by some factory worker in a distant country. If you gather enough followers, that factory worker might have to find a different line of work. Rejecting globalization is itself an act within globalization. Similarly, claiming objectivity by rejecting group membership is itself belonging to a de facto group, whose members often refuse to hear the perhaps legitimate reasons that others have for joining their groups. (The words "evangelical atheist" perhaps come to mind.) Living in a groupless world, these people reinforce each other's scorn of membership through a constant stream of verbal and written chatter.

I'm not sure how to deal with this problem of persistent self-deception. I can only close with a quote from one of Søren Kierkegaard's journals, taken from Charles Williams' "The New Christian Year":

To thee, O God, we turn for peace . . . but grant us too the blessed assurance that nothing shall deprive us of that peace, neither ourselves, nor our foolish, earthly desires, nor my wild longings, nor the anxious cravings of my heart.