Thank you for writing about this image, David. It's been on my mind, though I'll have to tell a story to explain why.
I wonder if you have seen the film of Ivan Illich speaking at the Architectural Association in London in 1974, soon after the publication of Medical Nemesis? It's on YouTube, the quality of the recording is not great, but it is fascinating, not least because much of the time is taken up with him responding to questioners.
About forty minutes in, he is taken to task by a man who introduces himself as a doctor, speaking in the tones of the English establishment: "I believe that the deficiency you are talking about is a spiritual one, and I would have thought, as a theologian, you would have hammered it in your book!"
Illich does not respond immediately, you might wonder if he is saying a prayer under his breath.
The doctor comes in again, pushing his point further. There is a little banter between them as to whether Illich having gone to theological college means he is a Christian – "it is not sufficient," Illich replies, "but no worry!" – and then the doctor doubles down: "As a Christian, I would have thought that in Jesus Christ, in his life, in his death and resurrection, we have got the key to this. You have used in your book classical mythology, but in Him you have both a historical and a transcendental [inaudible]. Now, of course, as a theologian, it may be that this now is out of date, I don't know, I'm just a [inaudible] Christian."
Now Illich begins to explain himself. "You see, it is rather easier to gain understanding, when I speak about the need for political action of self-limitation, about Prometheus and Epimetheus..."
"But they didn't exist!" the doctor heckles.
"Oh la la!" mutters Illich. "What kind of a doctor... you say you are a doctor?"
"Yes, I'm a doctor of medicine."
"But you do know, how do you call, that sin of yours which makes you operate on a person at high cost, engaging in a transaction of which you know that it is useless..."
"Not guilty!"
"Well, let me leave out your case. If I spoke on another level, conversation about the technical issues which I want to deal with would be practically impossible. For instance, when I told you that I began to write this book sitting on the steps of the Ganges in Benares, and just open-mouthed because I had never known that there would be thousands and thousands of people who would come in the hope that dying at the Ganga, they wouldn't have to go through it once more. Now, quite evidently, if you deal as a doctor with that population, you're in a very different situation than if you deal as a doctor with a population who says, 'But everybody in the world will give anything which he can give in order not to die!' An answer which, sooner or later, this evening, will pop up in this room..."
The doctor begins to interrupt, and this time Illich tells him, "Wait a minute."
"If I spoke... you introduced a very strange confusion between the theologian and the Christian... but if I talk to you about what I had the opportunity to mention... for some strange reasons, I hadn't talked about it for years, and today somebody mentioned something similar to me, and I said to him, friend, do you know how the first crucified Lord was represented? Do you?"
"Represented?" asks the doctor, puzzled. "Well he was represented by..."
"In art?" asks a woman elsewhere in the audience.
"Yes," says Illich. "Who here knows what the first crucifix looks like? The crucifix, the cross with Jesus nailed to the cross, represented physically. Look up any archaeology and you'll find out that I'm not kidding. It was found as a graffito, next to some phalluses, on the outside of a [Sabura?] house that was most probably a brothel. It represents a cross, a human body, a donkey's head and underneath written, 'So-and-so, some Alexis, worships his god!'"
"How do you know this?" demands the doctor.
"From archaeology!"
"Ooh, you see, archaeology!" And he pushes back, disputing how we could know that this was the first time the cross was represented. "Mr Illich, how could you possibly know?"
"I am sorry, check with anybody, we can go over to the museum."
"It's the first, maybe, that is extant. I honestly think that this is irrelevant..."
"One moment! Why should it be irrelevant? Let us check a moment why I say that [inaudible], if you ask for it, I gladly move to them. What we have here is, if I understand it correctly, ridicule heaped on people who would consider their saviour somebody who was hung on the gallows. There is ridicule heaped on religion not used for any purpose which is healing, which is this-worldly healing, feeding, but for the recognition of total powerlessness. Right? I see in this particular representation which, in the church's bureaucracies very quickly disappeared, and there must be more than three people here who have been brought up, who believe that we have been brought up as Christians, and nobody has told them that the first representation of the crucifix is slanderous, is ridiculing, and is, in a way, the deepest and the only, if you read the gospel, representative representation of what a crucified God-man means. Now, why do you want me to speak... to whom do you want me to speak about this?"
"I don't really see the relevance of this, the first representation of the cross..."
"As a Christian..." Illich begins, but the doctor continues.
"...I would think that you as a theologian and a man who is dealing with fundamental matters, you can not [inaudible] brought in any evidence of the spiritual."
"My friend, I told you that I had to speak about something upsetting, about our Promethean behaviour, our imitation of Prometheus having led us into a situation where we are culprits in a form of destruction and of suffering in front of which we must recognise ourselves as totally helpless, impotent to do anything. I'm speaking about something which is deeply anguishing. But I will refuse, under any circumstances, to *use* for any practical purposes His name. For this, I am too Jewish! I'll gladly use such tools as Epimetheus or Aesklepios."
Pardon me cluttering up your comments with such an extended transcript – I'd been meaning to revisit this part of the recording for something I'm writing, and your post gave me the excuse – but there's something in this encounter that I find magnetic. The confident, self-assured voice of the evangelical Christian from the English upper middle classes for whom salvation is an instrument, a "key" or something to be "hammered", with which to fix all that is wrong with the world, and the haunted witness of this wandering thinker who has glimpsed how outrageous the mystery of faith is, what violence it does to it to make it useful or to treat it as though it ought to be self-evident to reasonable people.
Oof, thank you so much for joining the dots and reconstructing this scene, Dougald. This is, I think, the second longest comment I’ve ever received, and a delight to read.
This somehow speaks toward a question I’m always puzzling over, but I’m never sure anyone else is very interested in it, so I feel a little adrift.
Illich’s refusal here to wheel out Jesus as a “spiritual” hammer to bang his point home with some sort of Christ-endorsed authority, (or maybe also the other way: to lend the authority of his work to bolster a spiritual christian kingdom) reminds me of Marshall McLuhan whose very devout catholic faith was intentionally silent in his work, in spite of theological resonance everywhere. The theologian E. P. Sanders expressed the same choice. All these around the same time.
My sense is that Modernity overthrew medieval ecclesial power by dis-integrating the spiritual from material, sacred from secular, public from private. Within that worldview, religious attempts to regain power have tended toward bringing the “spiritual” to bear aggressively down on, or against, the secular, and decrying the material as base or profane before a triumphalist christ.
I think the refusal of Illich & Co to play this game, was rooted in the intuition that the world had been falsely divided up in the first place. I’d never heard about this reference he made to the Alexaminos Gaffito, but its wonderful to me to see this image pointed to, to reveal the absurdity (and sacrilege) of this Modern battle from privileged quarters for greater social capital.
My investment in the language of messianism is what it is partly because, in this frame, sacred/secular spiritual/material divides become both irrelevant and nonsensical. I’m a little embarrassed by the idea, but I’m wanting to re-illuminate a frame that I think leaves those particularly Modern dualisms and their privileged power struggles behind.
Thanks, David! Regarding the generation of Illich and McLuhan, another interesting case to consider is Schumacher. I recently read a paper arguing that he downplayed the influence of Catholic social teaching on his work and chose to present Small is Beautiful through a Buddhist lens, because had he referenced Christianity, it would have been far harder to get a hearing, given the zeitgeist of the early '70s. (The White essay on environmental crisis and Christianity is in the mix of this zeitgeist, both an influence on and a symptom of.) Further, the author argues, the various custodians of the Schumacher legacy have systematically eliminated any reference to Christian theology, despite the evidence of his library. I'm thinking now that Illich's response to his questioner, and your line of thought here, might usefully complicate the case being made in that paper.
"My sense is that Modernity overthrew medieval ecclesial power by dis-integrating the spiritual from material, sacred from secular, public from private."
On this bit, I'm currently writing about Illich's late texts on ascesis and the history of the university. He lays great emphasis on the strangeness of the separation between acquisition of knowledge and embodied, ethical formation which came in with the shift from monastic to scholastic reading practices. He sees this split as foundational to modernity and unthinkable from any other culture, or from Western culture before the 12th century.
Dougald, forgive a tangent here, but do you think Illich today would be, in the same way, as hesitant to approach a mustering of G-d's names with so much work being done to rename murder in Ukraine, in Israel, and in the US after the slave G-d. Would Axemenos maybe wish to reclaim the Kreatur-headed Messiah, to seek to slap this messiah's name from the executionary mouth of the State? Or does the name Christian and much of the language around that sort of identity become like the Norse runes that Harjo says are so corrupted by racist mythopoetics that they must removed from "use"? This is immediately relevant to a waffling between two languages that I have been quiet between. If that makes sense. Is there some sense of a betrayal of the human life at the zero point of this business, whether you read it as a way fulfilled or a trajectory extinguished to allow a murderous exaltation of technique and bullshit to have that name uncontested?
Hey, Andrew! I was about to say how much I loved Illich's response and to add this comment from Jung to Dougald's original note, but I think it maybe fits in even more here. Jung talks about the only way to find the Grail is to BE the Grail, the only way the "Servator Mundi" (his word for "Messiah")shows up is if we ARE the Servator Mundi. In a sense, that is what Illich is doing here. Without "identifying" with the Christ, he is being the Christ in his puncturing of these institutions, flipping the tables at the Modern temples, while staying true to the Mystery of his experience. Not debasing it by using it as a tool. Something like this is maybe what David means in his book The Messianic Commons in that story he tells about seeing the Messiah when he and others helped protect a man having a psychotic episode while blocking traffic. I throw this comment in here not to hijack Dougald's or David's response, but because I think it tucks in between the poles of your question.
Your response reminds me of the Benjamin/Kafka bit about how the Messiah will come only when no longer needed. He will come only on the day after his arrival. He will come not on the last day but on the very last day. Which I am on board and your business above as well.
I am wondering along a different line regarding less how the messianic enters the cosmos and as who but more about the wrestle over the languaging around the ruins of the particulars and the memory/re-mebering of Yeshua. Does that make sense?
It does and I was leaving that for Dougald. I cut my line about how to howl so that the deaf can hear because you’re referencing our most recent horrors and insanity but nevermind Nazi runes, we have 2 thousand years of the whole Imperial Roman Christian era to wrestle with in that department. Just saying Yeshua, alone, instead of Jesus is a gently radical act and really pisses off the evil whackjobs that are the US cabinet. But I think I was implying that Illich’s being that is more powerful than his saying it. He is still saying this as a priest, as a representative of the Christ, from the place of his faith and understanding. The sacred requires protection. I always wondered why he remained a priest and except for that Samaritan interview hardly ever mentions Christ and now I know. But you know that my position is that we need to remove ourselves from the argument altogether, find ways to sing songs instead. Personally, I think the more we dig into the primordial aspects of this tradition- kind of like the way David mines ancient Greek- the more potent our re/membering of the language will be.
Benjamin/Kafka bit. Sounds like a classic Mel Brooks/Carl Reiner routine…
Excellent delving! You have helped me understand what I puzzled about for years: why an instrument of execution would have center place in the altars of those who worship the crucified one....
I am delighted! And interesting to think about where else modes, language and machineries of oppression are symbolically adopted by the oppressed in a moment of reversal.
The example that immediately comes to mind for the language of oppression symbolically adopted by the oppressed in a moment of reversal is the “N Word.” I hesitate to even make the comparison with the Christian adoption of the cross. I don’t really have a right to go there. But it makes me wonder what Black theologians have said about this. Is anyone aware of work on this?
I came back to this last night. It broke upon a hold and a spill. This is why we are in the orbit of this particular Messiah, despite all the bullshit why we still go to Jerusalem to be with Them. This Kreatur Messiah scratched in the wall, epithet gone to amulet is beauty. Thanks so much, David.
Thank you David, these posts have made me think a lot about the actual purpose of these rituals .
Whereas baptism definitely tastes like a ritual of exit to me, I’ve generally thought of the eucharist as a ritual of renewal, a place primarily for the utopic imagination, a dress rehearsal for the messianic age, a place to remember where we are going so as to not forget what we must be doing.
On that note,
The idea of the cross at the center of the ritual as a symbol reappropriated into a source of liberation (the staring at the snake to be cured of its venom) is powerful and makes a lot of sense . The only way up Is down and through. A messianic dress rehearsal where Goliath is not acknowledged and vanquished might ring hallow. A sort of white elephant left sitting in the room. “I hold the strangeness dear because a drama that calls my own body close to that kind of experience (imaginaly, symbolically, spiritually or however a person wishes to see it) probably should feel strange, dissonant and disquieting.” That resonates, Indeed a Christianity severed from the the suffering of the world is absurd at best and evil at worst.
So one hand it makes a lot of sense, on the other (the part where we substitute the jewish food law with the consuming of Jesus’s blood and body, creates an enormous abyss (at least in my limited understanding) between the semitic world view grounded in the earth and the christian word interested in the “spirit”.
How do we eliminate Gods pedagogy of the table, his insistence that we take seriously what we eat everyday and its implications for life and not end up in an ecological conundrum? Gods insistence that every table is an altar? My sense is that through Christ we made the table bigger, but we also severed it from the world that sustains it.
Anyway, thank you for creating this space! I often feel like I’m interested in things no one around me could care less about, so its a refreshing break to peek into this space and the weird minds that hold similar interests.
Thank you for writing about this image, David. It's been on my mind, though I'll have to tell a story to explain why.
I wonder if you have seen the film of Ivan Illich speaking at the Architectural Association in London in 1974, soon after the publication of Medical Nemesis? It's on YouTube, the quality of the recording is not great, but it is fascinating, not least because much of the time is taken up with him responding to questioners.
About forty minutes in, he is taken to task by a man who introduces himself as a doctor, speaking in the tones of the English establishment: "I believe that the deficiency you are talking about is a spiritual one, and I would have thought, as a theologian, you would have hammered it in your book!"
Illich does not respond immediately, you might wonder if he is saying a prayer under his breath.
The doctor comes in again, pushing his point further. There is a little banter between them as to whether Illich having gone to theological college means he is a Christian – "it is not sufficient," Illich replies, "but no worry!" – and then the doctor doubles down: "As a Christian, I would have thought that in Jesus Christ, in his life, in his death and resurrection, we have got the key to this. You have used in your book classical mythology, but in Him you have both a historical and a transcendental [inaudible]. Now, of course, as a theologian, it may be that this now is out of date, I don't know, I'm just a [inaudible] Christian."
Now Illich begins to explain himself. "You see, it is rather easier to gain understanding, when I speak about the need for political action of self-limitation, about Prometheus and Epimetheus..."
"But they didn't exist!" the doctor heckles.
"Oh la la!" mutters Illich. "What kind of a doctor... you say you are a doctor?"
"Yes, I'm a doctor of medicine."
"But you do know, how do you call, that sin of yours which makes you operate on a person at high cost, engaging in a transaction of which you know that it is useless..."
"Not guilty!"
"Well, let me leave out your case. If I spoke on another level, conversation about the technical issues which I want to deal with would be practically impossible. For instance, when I told you that I began to write this book sitting on the steps of the Ganges in Benares, and just open-mouthed because I had never known that there would be thousands and thousands of people who would come in the hope that dying at the Ganga, they wouldn't have to go through it once more. Now, quite evidently, if you deal as a doctor with that population, you're in a very different situation than if you deal as a doctor with a population who says, 'But everybody in the world will give anything which he can give in order not to die!' An answer which, sooner or later, this evening, will pop up in this room..."
The doctor begins to interrupt, and this time Illich tells him, "Wait a minute."
"If I spoke... you introduced a very strange confusion between the theologian and the Christian... but if I talk to you about what I had the opportunity to mention... for some strange reasons, I hadn't talked about it for years, and today somebody mentioned something similar to me, and I said to him, friend, do you know how the first crucified Lord was represented? Do you?"
"Represented?" asks the doctor, puzzled. "Well he was represented by..."
"In art?" asks a woman elsewhere in the audience.
"Yes," says Illich. "Who here knows what the first crucifix looks like? The crucifix, the cross with Jesus nailed to the cross, represented physically. Look up any archaeology and you'll find out that I'm not kidding. It was found as a graffito, next to some phalluses, on the outside of a [Sabura?] house that was most probably a brothel. It represents a cross, a human body, a donkey's head and underneath written, 'So-and-so, some Alexis, worships his god!'"
"How do you know this?" demands the doctor.
"From archaeology!"
"Ooh, you see, archaeology!" And he pushes back, disputing how we could know that this was the first time the cross was represented. "Mr Illich, how could you possibly know?"
"I am sorry, check with anybody, we can go over to the museum."
"It's the first, maybe, that is extant. I honestly think that this is irrelevant..."
"One moment! Why should it be irrelevant? Let us check a moment why I say that [inaudible], if you ask for it, I gladly move to them. What we have here is, if I understand it correctly, ridicule heaped on people who would consider their saviour somebody who was hung on the gallows. There is ridicule heaped on religion not used for any purpose which is healing, which is this-worldly healing, feeding, but for the recognition of total powerlessness. Right? I see in this particular representation which, in the church's bureaucracies very quickly disappeared, and there must be more than three people here who have been brought up, who believe that we have been brought up as Christians, and nobody has told them that the first representation of the crucifix is slanderous, is ridiculing, and is, in a way, the deepest and the only, if you read the gospel, representative representation of what a crucified God-man means. Now, why do you want me to speak... to whom do you want me to speak about this?"
"I don't really see the relevance of this, the first representation of the cross..."
"As a Christian..." Illich begins, but the doctor continues.
"...I would think that you as a theologian and a man who is dealing with fundamental matters, you can not [inaudible] brought in any evidence of the spiritual."
"My friend, I told you that I had to speak about something upsetting, about our Promethean behaviour, our imitation of Prometheus having led us into a situation where we are culprits in a form of destruction and of suffering in front of which we must recognise ourselves as totally helpless, impotent to do anything. I'm speaking about something which is deeply anguishing. But I will refuse, under any circumstances, to *use* for any practical purposes His name. For this, I am too Jewish! I'll gladly use such tools as Epimetheus or Aesklepios."
Pardon me cluttering up your comments with such an extended transcript – I'd been meaning to revisit this part of the recording for something I'm writing, and your post gave me the excuse – but there's something in this encounter that I find magnetic. The confident, self-assured voice of the evangelical Christian from the English upper middle classes for whom salvation is an instrument, a "key" or something to be "hammered", with which to fix all that is wrong with the world, and the haunted witness of this wandering thinker who has glimpsed how outrageous the mystery of faith is, what violence it does to it to make it useful or to treat it as though it ought to be self-evident to reasonable people.
Oof, thank you so much for joining the dots and reconstructing this scene, Dougald. This is, I think, the second longest comment I’ve ever received, and a delight to read.
This somehow speaks toward a question I’m always puzzling over, but I’m never sure anyone else is very interested in it, so I feel a little adrift.
Illich’s refusal here to wheel out Jesus as a “spiritual” hammer to bang his point home with some sort of Christ-endorsed authority, (or maybe also the other way: to lend the authority of his work to bolster a spiritual christian kingdom) reminds me of Marshall McLuhan whose very devout catholic faith was intentionally silent in his work, in spite of theological resonance everywhere. The theologian E. P. Sanders expressed the same choice. All these around the same time.
My sense is that Modernity overthrew medieval ecclesial power by dis-integrating the spiritual from material, sacred from secular, public from private. Within that worldview, religious attempts to regain power have tended toward bringing the “spiritual” to bear aggressively down on, or against, the secular, and decrying the material as base or profane before a triumphalist christ.
I think the refusal of Illich & Co to play this game, was rooted in the intuition that the world had been falsely divided up in the first place. I’d never heard about this reference he made to the Alexaminos Gaffito, but its wonderful to me to see this image pointed to, to reveal the absurdity (and sacrilege) of this Modern battle from privileged quarters for greater social capital.
My investment in the language of messianism is what it is partly because, in this frame, sacred/secular spiritual/material divides become both irrelevant and nonsensical. I’m a little embarrassed by the idea, but I’m wanting to re-illuminate a frame that I think leaves those particularly Modern dualisms and their privileged power struggles behind.
Thanks, David! Regarding the generation of Illich and McLuhan, another interesting case to consider is Schumacher. I recently read a paper arguing that he downplayed the influence of Catholic social teaching on his work and chose to present Small is Beautiful through a Buddhist lens, because had he referenced Christianity, it would have been far harder to get a hearing, given the zeitgeist of the early '70s. (The White essay on environmental crisis and Christianity is in the mix of this zeitgeist, both an influence on and a symptom of.) Further, the author argues, the various custodians of the Schumacher legacy have systematically eliminated any reference to Christian theology, despite the evidence of his library. I'm thinking now that Illich's response to his questioner, and your line of thought here, might usefully complicate the case being made in that paper.
"My sense is that Modernity overthrew medieval ecclesial power by dis-integrating the spiritual from material, sacred from secular, public from private."
On this bit, I'm currently writing about Illich's late texts on ascesis and the history of the university. He lays great emphasis on the strangeness of the separation between acquisition of knowledge and embodied, ethical formation which came in with the shift from monastic to scholastic reading practices. He sees this split as foundational to modernity and unthinkable from any other culture, or from Western culture before the 12th century.
Oh, also, Illich revisits the Alexaminos graffito and his understanding of its significance in The Rivers North of the Future.
Dougald, forgive a tangent here, but do you think Illich today would be, in the same way, as hesitant to approach a mustering of G-d's names with so much work being done to rename murder in Ukraine, in Israel, and in the US after the slave G-d. Would Axemenos maybe wish to reclaim the Kreatur-headed Messiah, to seek to slap this messiah's name from the executionary mouth of the State? Or does the name Christian and much of the language around that sort of identity become like the Norse runes that Harjo says are so corrupted by racist mythopoetics that they must removed from "use"? This is immediately relevant to a waffling between two languages that I have been quiet between. If that makes sense. Is there some sense of a betrayal of the human life at the zero point of this business, whether you read it as a way fulfilled or a trajectory extinguished to allow a murderous exaltation of technique and bullshit to have that name uncontested?
Hey, Andrew! I was about to say how much I loved Illich's response and to add this comment from Jung to Dougald's original note, but I think it maybe fits in even more here. Jung talks about the only way to find the Grail is to BE the Grail, the only way the "Servator Mundi" (his word for "Messiah")shows up is if we ARE the Servator Mundi. In a sense, that is what Illich is doing here. Without "identifying" with the Christ, he is being the Christ in his puncturing of these institutions, flipping the tables at the Modern temples, while staying true to the Mystery of his experience. Not debasing it by using it as a tool. Something like this is maybe what David means in his book The Messianic Commons in that story he tells about seeing the Messiah when he and others helped protect a man having a psychotic episode while blocking traffic. I throw this comment in here not to hijack Dougald's or David's response, but because I think it tucks in between the poles of your question.
Hey Bud.
Your response reminds me of the Benjamin/Kafka bit about how the Messiah will come only when no longer needed. He will come only on the day after his arrival. He will come not on the last day but on the very last day. Which I am on board and your business above as well.
I am wondering along a different line regarding less how the messianic enters the cosmos and as who but more about the wrestle over the languaging around the ruins of the particulars and the memory/re-mebering of Yeshua. Does that make sense?
It does and I was leaving that for Dougald. I cut my line about how to howl so that the deaf can hear because you’re referencing our most recent horrors and insanity but nevermind Nazi runes, we have 2 thousand years of the whole Imperial Roman Christian era to wrestle with in that department. Just saying Yeshua, alone, instead of Jesus is a gently radical act and really pisses off the evil whackjobs that are the US cabinet. But I think I was implying that Illich’s being that is more powerful than his saying it. He is still saying this as a priest, as a representative of the Christ, from the place of his faith and understanding. The sacred requires protection. I always wondered why he remained a priest and except for that Samaritan interview hardly ever mentions Christ and now I know. But you know that my position is that we need to remove ourselves from the argument altogether, find ways to sing songs instead. Personally, I think the more we dig into the primordial aspects of this tradition- kind of like the way David mines ancient Greek- the more potent our re/membering of the language will be.
Benjamin/Kafka bit. Sounds like a classic Mel Brooks/Carl Reiner routine…
Ha! Kafka-Brooks!
All agreed. Thanks, Jack. Point of him speaking as a priest is well taken. To be continued….thinking on this….
Excellent delving! You have helped me understand what I puzzled about for years: why an instrument of execution would have center place in the altars of those who worship the crucified one....
I am delighted! And interesting to think about where else modes, language and machineries of oppression are symbolically adopted by the oppressed in a moment of reversal.
The example that immediately comes to mind for the language of oppression symbolically adopted by the oppressed in a moment of reversal is the “N Word.” I hesitate to even make the comparison with the Christian adoption of the cross. I don’t really have a right to go there. But it makes me wonder what Black theologians have said about this. Is anyone aware of work on this?
I came back to this last night. It broke upon a hold and a spill. This is why we are in the orbit of this particular Messiah, despite all the bullshit why we still go to Jerusalem to be with Them. This Kreatur Messiah scratched in the wall, epithet gone to amulet is beauty. Thanks so much, David.
Thank you David, these posts have made me think a lot about the actual purpose of these rituals .
Whereas baptism definitely tastes like a ritual of exit to me, I’ve generally thought of the eucharist as a ritual of renewal, a place primarily for the utopic imagination, a dress rehearsal for the messianic age, a place to remember where we are going so as to not forget what we must be doing.
On that note,
The idea of the cross at the center of the ritual as a symbol reappropriated into a source of liberation (the staring at the snake to be cured of its venom) is powerful and makes a lot of sense . The only way up Is down and through. A messianic dress rehearsal where Goliath is not acknowledged and vanquished might ring hallow. A sort of white elephant left sitting in the room. “I hold the strangeness dear because a drama that calls my own body close to that kind of experience (imaginaly, symbolically, spiritually or however a person wishes to see it) probably should feel strange, dissonant and disquieting.” That resonates, Indeed a Christianity severed from the the suffering of the world is absurd at best and evil at worst.
So one hand it makes a lot of sense, on the other (the part where we substitute the jewish food law with the consuming of Jesus’s blood and body, creates an enormous abyss (at least in my limited understanding) between the semitic world view grounded in the earth and the christian word interested in the “spirit”.
How do we eliminate Gods pedagogy of the table, his insistence that we take seriously what we eat everyday and its implications for life and not end up in an ecological conundrum? Gods insistence that every table is an altar? My sense is that through Christ we made the table bigger, but we also severed it from the world that sustains it.
Anyway, thank you for creating this space! I often feel like I’m interested in things no one around me could care less about, so its a refreshing break to peek into this space and the weird minds that hold similar interests.