Dantean Peregrinations

Tags

Anglo-Saxon, Beatrice, Bible, Dante, Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, Edward Scissorhands, God, Hunger Games, Lent, mental illness

Nearly ten years ago now, I took a course on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Much has changed since then. Since then, I have gotten married, become a father, experienced the deaths of two friends, one of whom was as close as family. I have encountered various forms of mental illness in myself and others to a degree I don’t think I had experienced before. I have completed an MA on Paradise Lost, and am nearly finished a PhD in Old English literature, a kind of literature very different from Dantean allegory. Now, during the season of Lent, I am returning to Dante via a study group through our church; we meet weekly, and so I consider it fitting to report weekly on thoughts emerging from our reading and discussion.

Reading Dante after being steeped in Old English poetry for many months is a shocking thing indeed; it is a little like reading Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon back to back. Both OE poetry and the Comedy baptize, as it were, a particular aspect of secular (by which I mean not churchly, rather than necessarily evil) life. Old English poetry baptizes the heroic tradition, and there is little that is romantic here – indeed, the most emotively affective relationship in OE poetry is arguably the relationship between one’s one and one’s lord, a relationship that comes to be a way of talking about our relationship with God. The poetry is spare and it is haunted by doom and vanity. There are battles.  Moreover, I would add that the OE imagination is hardly anti-Biblical, for it simply elaborates upon seeds of images it finds in the Bible. The description of Christ as lord is so Biblical that we even talk about Him as such in an age when the term “lord” has come to be a rather hollow title. Doom and vanity are thoroughly Biblical themes, as evident in texts such as Ecclesiastes and Job. And battle is found literally in the Old Testament and figurally (against powers and principalities) in the New Testament.

Against the backdrop of OE poetry, Dante can seem (and I only say seem, because I know he is not) decadent, with a love of material, place, and romance. Certainly, the primary thing baptized here is the courtly love or fin amor tradition, so very odd from both an Anglo-Saxon and modern perspective. After the tonic of OE poetry, it does not feel stern enough; from a modern mindset, we need only imagine how surprised we would be if we asked for someone’s testimony of their relationship with Christ and they began, “Well, you see, I was at this party, and there was this girl…” To be fair, though, Dante’s chosen theme has Biblical seeds as deep as those of the Anglo-Saxon imagination; one need only consider books like Song of Solomon, and the celebration of the wedding feast upon Christ’s return at the end of time.

One may wonder if such imaginative elaborations of Biblical imagery are not dangerous, and all I can say to that is that it is indeed a dangerous thing to play with a double-edged sword. Too often in the church past and present the heroic imagination of the Old English type has metamorphed into something it is in its best instances not – a means of justifying violence unjustifiable on Christian grounds. Similarly, we need not look far to find places where spiritual experience and romantic/erotic love are being mistaken for each other in unhealthy ways; I think of the kinds of youth groups I grew up in, where the boundaries between hormones and the Holy Spirit were not always clear – I also think of Heloise and Abelard. Such dangers, of course, are why we learn swordsmanship, so to speak, by immersing ourselves in the training grounds of the traditions and disciplines of the Church past and present. Nonetheless, I do think the instance of Dante is interesting insofar as it is simply odd; put another way, had I been Dante’s friend, I would have advised him to get over his silly infatuation with Beatrice and focus on God – advice for which the church would have been much poorer.

The last time I read Dante, I think I was too cynical to understand such odd “Beatrice moments.” I think this was in part because I was exposed to too many poor ways of understanding them by my Evangelical background. Generally, speaking, it was understood (though never overtly stated) that the “Aha” moment we were all looking for was one of pure, personal experience with God. This happened through worship, prayer, reading one’s Bible etc. There was little room for those who had such “aha” moments elsewhere. There was also little room for those for whom “aha” moments were scarce or non-existent. As someone with OCD and depression, I fell largely into this latter category, though I tried very hard to have such experiences. The day I realized that Christianity was about much more than such a very limited Evangelical “aha” experience was a very freeing day indeed, though it did not of course happen in a day. And I still struggle to know where such experiences and emotions fit in the spiritual practice of someone who also has mental illness.

So, last time I approached Dante, I think I was suspicious of this instantaneous experience that changed Dante’s life, given how much it resembled the suffocating conversion and experience stories I had heard and tried to force in myself in Evangelical circles. What I am seeing this time around is that Dante’s experience is different from this. Dante finds grace in an odd and unexpected places, or at least what would seem so in terms of an Evangelical conversion narrative. Moreover, his experience is always open rather than closed. It always felt to me as if there were a number of things vying for my heart, and they were mutually exclusive – if I were to experience God, I should be careful not to experience other things. Dante’s love, however, is one that embraces rather than excludes other “aha” moments. Rather than avoiding them lest they distract one from the “aha” moment one is supposed to have with God, one allows them to be absorbed into the higher love of God. For Dante, we avoid idolatry, not by closing our eyes, but by looking up.

I think another thing that has changed for me is my general recognition that “aha” moments really can have worth. Being an older brother type (from the parable of the prodigal sons) and having been burned by a pressure cooker environment that expected God to appear as personal experience, I tended toward a dark-night-of-the-soul kind of theology, informed far more by the kind of loyalty and commitment prized in OE poetry than by an experiential faith, Evangelical or otherwise. What I have begun to see is that there are watershed moments; there are moments that matter. But they are not earned. Grace spills unexpectedly out on those who have not sought to experience it. And it can elude for a lifetime those who seek it very earnestly. Christian life is not about making these grace-experiences happen, nor is it about assuming that we are not Christians if we don’t have them. Rather, it is about being open to discovering them, thankful to God when they are there, and patient and prayerful when they are not. We must neither scorn them for their brevity nor cling to them as an anchor.

I do have one final thing to say, and that regards the very weird experiential faith of Dante involving Beatrice. I have been thinking about it, and I think that in a postmodern age we may in fact stand a chance of understanding this better than those in modernity, though perhaps not quite so well as a premodern person. There are two examples that come to mind of similar “Beatrice moments” in modern popular culture. Admissibly, they are much further away from blossoming into an allegory of faith, though there is the potential there.

The first is the Tim Burton film Edward Scissorhands. What is related in this film is an experience the narrator had as a child. She loved Edward, but clearly married someone else (she has a granddaughter), and Edward is still in exile making snow. In any case, the narrator at the end of the film says with poignancy of her experience of snow (which reminds her of Edward), “Sometimes I still catch myself dancing.” I don’t think this takes away from any relationships or loves that the narrator had after Edward. But the complicated relationship she had with Edward led her to an “aha” moment that stuck with her the rest of her life.

The second example is from The Hunger Games (warning: spoiler alert). The “aha” moment in this series is Katniss’s early encounter with Peeta, when he conspires to give her bread and thereby hope. The love here does in fact end in marital love, but for a while the series suggests that it need not. Katniss is conflicted between her love for Peeta and her love for Gale. In an alternate version of the story, Katniss could presumably have ended up with Gale and had no less appreciation of the earlier effect of Peeta’s love that was something different than simple romantic love. Though not perfectly analogous, I think these two modern narratives might give us a glimpse of what Dante is about in his love of Beatrice.

Some Boethian Musings on Lent

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Boethius, Christ, Consolation of Philosophy, Desert Fathers, evil and suffering, God, Gospel, Jesus, Lent

I am in a particularly difficult situation right now – looking for jobs in a very tough job market and overall trying to figure out my vocation – and I often hear from people that “God has something out there for me, so just keep going.” This by the way is perfectly good theology – I cannot fault it – and I also cannot fault those who wish to give me comfort in this way, well meaning as they usually are. However, whenever I hear it I can’t help wondering about the bigger question of the nature of the “something” out there for me. Implied in the statement is that this something will be something I want, something that people can immediately recognize as a blessing. And when I think of this, I think of Boethius.

For those who are not familiar with Boethius, he was a medieval philosopher and politician in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. He was accused of conspiring against his emperor, Theodoric, and was imprisoned. His most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, opens with the imprisoned Boethius’s lament. Very soon, however, he receives a visit from Lady Philosophy, who takes him to task for his fruitless and immature self-pity, and undertakes a dialogue with him, leading him through a gauntlet of questions and answers that cut to the philosophical heart of his problem, often leaving behind exactly the kinds of question we most care about in the twenty first century, which is how we deal with suffering and loss emotionally. In fact, there is a sense in which Boethius is speaking of something that I think we have nearly lost the cultural capacity to imagine, an inexorable reality that is both good and does not cater to each and every of our whims [rather, people in general seem to believe in an inexorable reality that is by and large evil and destructive, and a progress fighting against this reality and for our whims – the idea that a) the cosmos might be good and b) that it provides a pattern to conform to rather than an imperfection to be perfected is very alien to a modern way of thinking]

In any case, I think of Boethius at times like these because Philosophy will not let him remain under the delusion that the “something” out there for him must necessarily be something he will like or something most people would consider a blessing. It includes both the top and the bottom of the wheel of fortune, and some brutal facts about the way things work. Boethius, for instance, must realize that though he was in his own way seeking to do something he considered good through politics –to “change the world,” so to speak – this change is not ultimately in his hands – from Boethius’s perspective, he left behind a corrupt government. Moreover, the end of Boethius’s own personal story is something of a case study in what he was trying to show in The Consolation – Boethius was eventually executed for his alleged crimes rather than reinstated.

Despite its name, The Consolation is hard reading. It is hard because all those things we want, such as emotional comfort, reassurance, and diversion are not there. In fact, the first few times I read it, I, coming out a good emotive Evangelical background, kept wondering: “Where is personal experience? Where is the incarnational Christ that meets us where we are at? Isn’t it He whom we turn to for consolation?” This sense was in fact so pressing for me that I gave a paper approximately oriented around it to a society of Boethian scholars, and scandalized them by suggesting that there is no consolation at the end. For a while I wondered if Boethius in fact had not been a little too influenced by Greek philosophy and not enough influenced by Christ. What I did not recognize but hopefully recognize now is that, whether or not there was consolation, there was certainly truth, and it is a truth that we need to hear particularly around the season of Lent.

While it is nice to come up with a comfortable juxtaposition wherein we have the cold, unfeeling God of the philosophers on one side and the personable buddy Jesus on the other, I can’t help seeing the point Boethius was driving at at the very heart of the Gospels – part of faith means recognizing that God’s blessing and salvation are not the same as personal or national success. At one point, Christ is talking about the crucifixion and Peter, being a good Evangelical, stops him and says, “Don’t go talking about crosses and suffering. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. And surely it cannot be that.” Christ’s response is to address Peter as Satan. And we see it elsewhere in reverse: when asked whether a man went blind on account of his own or his parents sin, Jesus says it is neither – it is so God can be glorified. And those who died when the tower of Siloam fell on them were not worse people than those who did not. The God revealed in Christ is the same God who speaks out of the whirlwind in Job.

Like Boethius and Christ in the Gospels, I often wonder about those who are not blessed. I have heard from various Christians stories about how God has brought about a particular set of circumstances to bless them in a particular way; moreover, I have no doubt that God is behind these things – every good and perfect gift is from above. But I sometimes can’t help wondering about the flip-side of these stories. What about the other people who were killed because they did not leave the country at just the right moment when the tsunami hit? What about the people who were not protected from the stray bullet by the Bible in their pocket? I can’t help thinking that, for every person who experiences miraculous healing through prayer, there are many others who die with prayers no less fervent. Once in fact I heard someone listing the things they were thankful for. They were in the hospital for something at least treatable, and one of the things they were thankful for was that they were not like so and so in the next bed who was dying of such and such a disease etc. Apparently, God is praiseworthy because he did not give me that illness, and we can move on without dealing with the fact that someone – anyone – suffers from it.

Lent looks these problems square in the face. With Christ we set our faces like flint toward Jerusalem. I imagine that none of the Desert Fathers went into the desert because they could not find one – deserts were plentiful and barren in the minds and hearts and cultures of the affluent societies around them. Rather they sought a physical environment that in fact reflects the way God’s world really works, at least in this time between times. People are parched and hungry in the desert. Yes, people die. And in faith we say that, yes, God made this world and it is good with all its mysteries and tragedies, though that does not keep us from asking once or twice now and then if this cup cannot be taken from us. Some like Pilate think truth is illusory, a vapour that does not really exist. Others seem to think of it as an objectively solid club to beat people over the head with. I suggest that it is a nail that pierces our hands and feet, and penetrates even to dividing joint and marrow. And there will not be resurrection until we have tasted it in our blood.

Back when I was part of Evangelical circles, there was not much talk of Lent. I have a theory that this is because there was a popular theology asserting that Christ not only died to take away our sins but also our suffering. If you take away suffering – the long, slow purgatorial path of painful penance – you can do away with Lent. From the perspective of such theology, Christ celebrated Lent once for all, and it is finished.

I and the liturgical calendar would like to submit otherwise. The blessing is not that Christ takes away our suffering, but rather that our suffering in a way as miraculous as transubstantiation can become part of the suffering of His body, the church. Pain and suffering will not go away this side of the apocalypse, and there are always people, Christian and otherwise, who will suffer. In Lent, we as the church do not come to fix this, though goodness knows we will do as much as we can. Rather, we witness to an alternative way of suffering, a way that shatters the illusions and vexations that we take comfort in, a way that exposes us to the searing whirlwind of truth in the desert of repentance. And the deepest secret of all is that there is a strange tenderness, even in the heart of the whirlwind.

 

Dust Thou Art, and Unto Dust Shalt Thou Return

Tags

Ash Wednesday, Christianity, dust, God, Lent, Poetry, Religion and Spirituality

Converting Philomel

 

How can it turn to praise?

Not the lamenting, or weeping,

Or anger, or elation, or any of that;

But the dead dullness

That blankets my heart, I’d say,

If “blanket” were not too active a word?

How?  Mourning can turn to joy,

Sorrow to laugher,

But death breeds death,

Sterile;

 

A seed must die

To be reborn,

But some die otherwise

Ground to dust.

 

Shall the dust praise You?

 

Once, God wrote with his finger in the dust,

And surely this is a start?

I never heard what he wrote

But they say it was enough

To melt the stones

In raging hands and hearts,

And make these rocks cry out:

Selah.

 

Others are used for noble tasks

Beyond such common use;

But perhaps it is not nothing

To be

A tablet

Etched by the hand of God,

Then scattered, dust and ash,

On the listing wind?

Lent: Not giving you up

Tags

give you up, Lent, rick astley

 

 

Not sure where this (like most memes) comes from, but it’s far too good to not share:

 

The Mockingjay and the Dove

Tags

church-state relations, comic, Eucharist, horror, Hunger Games, Job, Lent, messianic figure, salvation, Stanley Hauerwas, state, temptation, truth, violence

By way of beginning this post, I want to clarify what I am and what I am not doing.  I am not claiming that Suzanne Collins is a Christian or has a Christian message, though this may well be true.  Nor am I offering “the gospel according to the Hunger Games” – I am satisfied enough with the gospel according to the gospels, and it strikes me as wrongheaded and potentially heterodox to claim that other stories are the gospel; we must let the gospel be the gospel and stories be stories.  What I am claiming though is that the works of good authors reflect something true in creation, and what is true in creation reflects (albeit elliptically) truth about God.  Indeed, we should not be surprised if we find in creation and the stories that arise therefrom what Stanley Hauerwas describes as a Christological “grain of the universe.”  Therefore, through interpretive scansion of the Hunger Games series and the universe it describes, I am looking for what Hopkins called the inscape that points back to the instress on creation caused by God.

First of all, I want to clear something up about the series.  If you read it and thought “this could happen in (insert favorite dictatorship) or a galaxy far, far away,” you have missed the point.  Do not let this minor detail interrupt important affairs such as eating and drinking, marrying and being married.  Considering such details will only put out your day.

For the rest, one of the latent questions will have to do with the brutal violence, some of which leads in the story to the deformation of identity (I here think of Peeta).  Should Christians think about such things?  To tell the truth, I was impressed that they were included.  There are kinds of unspeakable suffering that will not fit in brown paper packages tied up in string.  And some of these experiences we will not understand this side of heaven.  Generically, the entire scope of the cosmos is comic.  But this does not mean that every story in between is comic, and it does not mean we should work as hard as possible to make every story comic.  Horror is horror, and sometimes we just have to let it be without pretending we can redeem it on our own terms by making up stories that we intend as consolations but that only end up making God look evil or like a fool.  God does not insult Job by offering him a narrative of “how everything worked out for best in the end,” and we might do well to follow His example.

But to get to the heart of my argument, the book is primarily an exploration of what constitutes salvation.  In the series, we encounter a world very much in need of salvation, and it offers two different messianic models, the rebel warrior and “the boy with the bread.”  This strikes me as particularly resonant of the Christian story, for these two figures embody the messianic crisis encountered at the advent of Christ.  Many were hoping for the rebel warrior, who would in fact overthrow the government and establish political salvation.  Instead, they got a Christ who revealed himself in the Eucharistic breaking of bread.  Moreover, I would suggest that Christians still face this temptation.  We are perennially tempted to take charge and “change the world” in ways that conflate sociopolitical power and Christianity – and we are perennially called back gently to “the breaking of bread and to prayer.”  Because I don’t want to ruin the series for anyone who hasn’t read, I will not spoil it by giving away the ending, but I will say that, given this typology, the conclusion thoroughly accords with Christian faith.  Whether Suzanne Collins intended this or not, I don’t know – what I do know is that her story taps into the innate human longing for salvation not by power but by the Bread of Life.

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. at the Qingming Festival

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Asian American, Benedict XVI, China, Chinese, civil rights, class solidarity, death, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, dissident, Eucharist, exodus, Glenn Omatsu, Holy Week, Hoodie Sunday, human rights, I Have a Dream, Lent, liberation theology, Malcolm X, March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Moses, mountaintop, Promised Land, Qin Shihuang, Qingming Festival, radical, Sam Wells, Spring and Autumn Period, Third World Liberation Front, Tiananmen, Trayvon Martin

清明時節雨紛紛
路上行人欲斷魂
借問酒家何處有
牧童遙指杏花村

The drizzling rain at Qingming time
The rending flesh of the pedestrians
Where to find a pub to drink my sadness?
A cowherd points to Almond Flower Village.

–杜牧 Du Mu

Since before the days when Qin Shihuang conquered the various warring states that came to constitute the imperial Middle Kingdom, there has been the tradition of the Qingming Festival. Originally commemorated in memory of the accidental burning of a Spring and Autumn Period official’s servant, the festival has developed since the Tang Dynasty to be a day to honour the dead by sweeping the graves of ancestors, carrying willows and flowers to ward off evil spirits, and more recently, remembering the deaths of intellectual dissidents in twentieth-century Chinese history.

Typically, Qingming Festival falls on April 5.

But this year’s Qingming Festival falls on April 4.

And incidentally, April 4 is the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think this warrants some theological reflection, particularly from Chinese North American Christians, about our solidarity in the struggle for human rights.

On the night before he died, King preached at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. His sermon came to be known as, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and his words that night foreshadowed his assassination the next day:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t really matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!  And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man: mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

Incidentally, Sam Wells also has a great meditation on death and Steve Jobs through the Mountaintop speech as well.

Asian American scholar Glenn Omatsu protests the domestication of the Asian American participation in the civil rights movement. He points specifically to King and says that the invocation of his tradition of non-violence has overshadowed the radical actions taken by the Third World Liberation Front in 1968 to found ethnic studies departments in California universities. For Omatsu, it’s not the legacy of King that needs to be reclaimed for our solidarity for rights, but that of Malcolm X.

I take issue with Omatsu.

When King said that he had been to the mountaintop, it would be right to think that he’s invoking Moses climbing Mount Nebo to look over into the Promised Land that he wouldn’t be able to enter with the beloved community. Most would remember his dream articulated at the March on Washington that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” For Omatsu, it’s precisely this that has led to a neo-conservatism among Asian Americans who believe themselves to have made it economically as “the model minority.” America is finally colour-blind, say the suburban dwellers; the dream has been realized. Omatsu is disgusted.

But a closer look at King’s sermon complicates things. Sure, King is a Moses figure, but the Promised Land of which King speaks does not refer to a colour-blind nation. Rather, it’s about a global human rights revolution in the second half of the twentieth century, a call to freedom just like Moses called on Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go:

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee–the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”

King had been to the mountaintop. He had seen the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the Albany Movement, the Civil Rights Bill, the March on Washington, the March on Selma, and the action for which he was in Memphis. Like Moses, King had been to the mountaintop, and he had seen the Promised Land of justice and equality for the least of these, the coloured colonized by white supremacy and the impoverished trampled by an economic oligarchy. Interpreting the story of Exodus through the lens of solidarity, he sees that Pharaoh’s tactic for keeping the slaves enslaved is to divide them among themselves, to keep the ministers only thinking about themselves and preaching irrelevant airy-fairy hopes of white robes, milk and honey, and streets of gold over yonder while people here go naked, live in slums, and stay hungry. “But whenever the slaves get together,” King preached, “something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.”

For King, at that moment, what was needed was direct action for the case at hand: justice for sanitation workers in Memphis wearing black T-shirts and holding signs that read, “I Am a Man”: “Let us keep the issues where they are,” he said. “The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers.”  Here, he fuses the Moses tradition with the Jericho Road in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. As he puts it in the speech, just like the Samaritan stopping on the “Bloody Pass,” we too must realize that the plight of the sanitation worker in Memphis is our plight as well. He imagines the priest and the Levite passing up the bloodied robbed man because they fear that he might be bait to lure them to bandits, or worse, he might be a con artist himself. King speculates that they probably thought, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” He then interprets the Good Samaritan as asking: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” King then continues:

That’s the question before you tonight. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?” The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

It was for this that King knew that he was going to his death. He talks about getting on the plane from Atlanta that morning, of the pilot’s voice coming over the public address system saying that because King was on board, they had had to take extra security cautions because of the threats on King’s life coming from Memphis. He remembers that before what we now know as the Civil Rights Movement happened, he had been stabbed while signing books, and the blade had come so close to his aorta that The New York Times reported at the time that if he had just sneezed, he would have died. He knew this because what he was doing was radical because he wasn’t just calling for everybody just to get along in a colour-blind nation. (And by the way, as James Cone points out, King and Malcolm X need not be pitted against each other, but can rather be seen as complementary figures in the black liberation movement.)

He was calling for class solidarity as the rubric of racial reconciliation and social justice. He had protested the Vietnam War, particularly because African Americans were disproportionately drafted, and now he was marching on poverty, calling for economic action on the part of everyone listening to him: “If it means leaving work, if it means leaving school–be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.” He was calling for both marches and outright boycotts on unjust corporations, “bank-ins” to take money out of mainstream banks and put them in black banks, and “insurance-ins” where black people could buy insurance plans from black insurance companies. He was calling for an Occupy movement before there was an Occupy movement; he was advocating precautions for the beloved community before the idea of subprime mortgages targeting African American populations was even invented. And for him, this Memphis case of sanitation workers was the perfect case where the rubber met the road because for King, the measure of a society was how the sanitation workers were treated. Radical? Yes. It’s what got King killed.

Perhaps it’s only right that the anniversary of the assassination of King and the Qingming Festival fall this year within Holy Week in the liturgical calendar. Jesus’ Good Samaritan parable was offensive precisely because as Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it in Letters and Papers from Prison, it focused Christian practice on being “the Man [sic] for Others.” It was told to a lawyer who wanted to justify himself for having fulfilled the commandment of loving one’s neighbour as oneself. Jesus turned the lawyer’s world upside-down, telling him to go and do as a Samaritan would have done to go out of his way to help a bloodied stranger of the wrong geopolitical stripe on the Bloody Pass of the Jericho Road.

This was arguably what got Jesus, Bonhoeffer, and King killed. The offence was a radical view of the neighbour. Will we indeed love our neighbours as ourselves? What if the neighbour is of the wrong nationality? the wrong race? the wrong class? King’s words ring in our ears: The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

This is a question for reflection for Chinese North American Christians today. Qingming Festival is a day to honour the dead, yes. But to be Christian is not merely to honour our own dead, those within our own family or those within the diaspora that we call “Chinese.” King’s legacy–one that also garnered us civil liberties–begs us to come out of the convenient labels that we’ve constructed for ourselves–“Chinese,” “Asian,” “Asian American”–and realize that our solidarity with the poor for justice cuts across racial, ethnic, and class lines. There is a saying among Chinese in the diaspora that we should only sweep beneath the awnings of our own homes. The irony of this year’s Qingming Festival is that it calls us precisely to repent of this notion.

Yes, we honour our ancestors today. Some of these, yes, are the Chinese political dissidents that we remember yearly. But one of these is also the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Try that, friends, for much-needed reconciliation between Chinese American and African American communities today. Perhaps our Chinese churches should bring hoodies and a bag of skittles to church too. It is, after all, the Qingming Festival.

But more than that, as the Qingming Festival and King’s assassination anniversary both fall in Holy Week, we also remember as Christians the one who has gone before us from death to life, Jesus Christ. We have hope in King’s vision not because of King’s death, but because the resurrection of Jesus Christ at the end of this Holy Week reminds us that King’s blessed hope is ours as well. Strangely enough, this has been precisely what Pope Benedict XVI has been saying to the faithful regarding charity during this Lenten season:

The Lord’s disciples, united with him through the Eucharist, live in a fellowship that binds them one to another as members of a single body. This means that the other is part of me, and that his or her life, his or her salvation, concern my own life and salvation. Here we touch upon a profound aspect of communion: our existence is related to that of others, for better or for worse.

Qingming Festival and the assassination of King are not the end of the story of solidarity–indeed, of communion–with the least of these. They are the beginning: “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”

When the Desert is Not the Edgy Place of Radical Prophetic Witness You Thought It Was

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Ash Wednesday, Lent, prophet, Prophetic Critique, radical, radical christians

Thanks to Chinglican and Captain Thin for adding necessary clarification, insight, and nuance to my rather terse critique of Driscoll.  I wish they could be there to tell my students what I mean when I am lecturing.  Sometimes I am too aphoristic.

Today, I want to talk about Lent, particularly about the motif of desert asceticism usually associated with it.  I was at an Ash Wednesday service the other day, and the text was from Hebrews 3.  What was interesting about it was its focus on the desert as a negative place.  Among Christians of my generation, the desert has in a sense become crowded – we like the desert fathers’ radical critique of society, and we like the wildness it represents outside the walls of the staid established church etc.  But in Hebrews 3, we see not an instance of noble desert asceticism, but an act of rebellion; Anglicans will be familiar with it from the “Venite” section in Morning Prayer:

“Today, if you hear his voice,
⁸ do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion,
during the time of testing in the wilderness,
⁹ where your ancestors tested and tried me,
though for forty years they saw what I did.
¹⁰ That is why I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
¹¹ So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’ ”

This led me to wonder what the difference might be between positive and negative desert experiences.  For Christ and for many of the Church Fathers, the desert brought them closer to God.  But the desert experience here only distances Israel from her God and the land he promised her.

Interestingly, the contrast between these experiences is something we also know from our own experience.  We can think of those whose faith has been greatly deepened by desert-like experiences of suffering; we can also think of those who have been hurt again and again and again until they collapsed under their wounds and lost their faith entirely.  We can probably empathize to a certain degree with both.  What I want to explore here is how we might take up our own suffering – our own desert experiences – in a way that is positive and faith building rather than negative and corrosive.

Particularly interesting to me are the verses following this passage in Hebrews 3; the author talks about the negative desert experience as being “hardened by sin’s deceitfulness,” and I think we all know what this means.  “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” says the old saying that so wonderfully sums up what such hardening is about.  Betrayal – deceit – makes one more careful and more guarded; sooner or later, it causes one to trust no one but oneself.  And I wonder if this is not what this verse is about, if Israel did not in the desert experience and enact the deceitfulness of sin so often that it trusted no one – including God.  One does not get up one day and decide to rebel against God; it gradually happens as we experience fallen-ness – the deceitfulness of sin – and guard our hearts so tightly against its effects that not even God can get in.

But what can we do about this?  We cannot pretend we are not sinners, and cannot pretend that we do not experience sin’s deceitfulness daily in its manifold manifestations in the world (I include here the experience of suffering).  And what is one to do except become hard?  How can we remain spiritually tender amidst the hardness of the desert?

My first thought is that we can’t – which is why Christ has done this for us and imparts this to us through his spirit.  Christ is the only one who can both set his face like flint toward Jerusalem and still have the tenderness to forgive his enemies and make plans for the future care of his mother while on a cross.  You see, the miracle of Christ is not simply that he endured excruciating pain – even Jack Bauer can do that.  No, the miracle is that he endured excruciating pain and remained fully human, open to God and others, without hardening his heart like a stone.  If I might put it this way, it takes One who is fully God to remain fully and openly human while one is suffering – and that One is Christ.

This of course is why the author of Hebrews encourages those in the church to encourage one another daily as a way of avoiding the hardening that comes from sin and suffering.  It takes great faith to believe that God – and not the suffering, evil, and sin we see around us – is in fact the Sovereign of the universe.  Yet it is precisely this faith that allows us to remain open, relational, and human when we undergo suffering.  If evil is indeed the last word in the universe, we might as well just hunker down and do our best to survive until we die; but if the last word in the universe is a God who exists in an eternal trinity of self-giving, we can have faith that, at the end of the day, He (rather than our own hard shells) will ensure our ultimate protection, even when that is not immediately evident and demonstrable.  Through faith in the Spirit of Christ, we face our suffering as humans capable of relationships with others and God rather than as stones.  And it is through the church – through encouraging each other daily – that we remind each other of this faith and the way it leads us to God rather than rebellion in the desert.