James Alison: "The Portal and the Halfway House"

From Session 10 of his "Forgiving Victim Course."  My bold.

I’d like to explore some ways in which the image of the half-way house can help us re-imagine what it is and isn’t like living with Church. First some similarities. A central one, perhaps, is that the Church, like the half-way house, is not an end in itself. No one thinks that the chief joy of coming out of prison is that you get to go to a half-way house. The half-way house only has existence at all as a staging post, something which has enough elements in common with the sort of life that the prisoner is leaving behind that she not be completely drowned in her own inability to cope with returning to freedom. Nevertheless its whole purpose is to prepare people for freedom, a way of life which has very little in common with what they are used to. This new way of life is one where they will be relied on to be creative, responsible, imaginative, full of initiative, perseverance and so on. In other words, the half-way house exists only as a means at the service of something much greater than itself: forms of social flourishing and togetherness which are initially out of reach of the ex-con. For those who have “come through the system” the idea is that after a time, they become viable in entirely new fields. Then they will have, in the best of cases, only a loose affiliation with the half-way house, an entirely voluntary desire to be associated with it, gratitude for the help derived from their association with it, and a longing to help other ex-cons who are coming through.

Another point of similarity with Church is that the very existence of the half-way house is a firm sign of a benevolent intention implanted by “outside”. “Outside” knows what it is like to live well, and knows that those who currently don’t know how to do so, owing to their time in prison, are in principle capable of living well and can be nudged beyond their current patterns of desire. The quality of the bricks and mortar of the half-way house, and even the competence of the social-workers and probation officers, are secondary to the fact that these are genuine signs, more or less effective signs, of what is a real instantiated project, more or less effectively instantiated, a project which is the fruit of a pattern of desire, a draw, from an outside which knows that there is a way, an arduous way to be sure, of people moving from their prison socialisation to their free socialisation. The half-way house, like the Church, is an effective sign of a draw from beyond itself that is empowering its residents into becoming creators of society.

A third similarity between Church and the half-way house might be that neither is concerned with producing pre-determined results. A half-way house is not designed to train ex-cons specifically to be computer programmers, or beauticians, landscape-gardeners or air-traffic controllers, though any half-way house would be delighted if its former residents were to achieve stable careers in any of those fields. Its purpose is relational, enabling an arduous change in the ex-con’s pattern of desire, imagination, capacity for socialization, self-esteem, such that they are no longer constantly liable to trip themselves, and others, up, but are able to imagine some good, one that is in some way matched to the talents and idiosyncracies that they are coming to discover as their own, a good that they are increasingly equipped to realise as their talents are allowed to develop. The hope is that eventually they be empowered and connected in such a way as to turn renewed imagination into recognisable flourishing. The half-way house is a structured space in which people move beyond merely being free from something (enforced confinement) to being free for something: constructive and creative involvement with society. Likewise, Church is a structured space in which people move beyond being free from something (being run by death and its fear) to being free for something: constructive and creative involvement in new forms of togetherness and enjoyment.

So: not an end in itself, but an effective sign of a draw from beyond itself, whose hoped-for outcome is free lives run by changed patterns of desire. Well, so far so good. But in fact all of these similarities depend on something which is in evidence when it comes to half-way houses, but not at all in evidence when it comes to Church, and this is the way in which a more or less healthy “outside” society is what people are used to. In our normal countries “Outside” is vastly bigger than “inside”: those who are in prison are, it is to be hoped, a tiny minority of the populace; they are there because of failures to respect the norms of healthy outside life, and their presence there is a more or less long term, but in principle, a temporary, abstraction from where they normally belong. Thus, from the point of view of those in prison the existence of a half-way house is a comparatively banal statement of the values of the wider society, an indication of a continuity between life on the Outside and life on the Inside, along with a helping hand to face the challenges of adapting to a less-structured normalcy. None of those inside a prison deny the existence of an “outside”, even those who will in fact never see it again. So the fact of the existence of a half-way house is not, in itself a very revolutionary or radical statement.

That third point seems really important to me - the thing about the "non-pre-determined results"  - and it's how A.A. works, too.   The experience is open-ended; no particular end is sought (except day-to-day living without alcoholic or drugs), because each person is unique individual with his or her own destiny to live out.  Nothing in particular is prescribed; in fact, A.A., throughout its discussion of the process, goes out of its way to note that some people are like this, and some are like that.   These things were discovered empirically, and were written down to attempt to help all comers.

And the 12th Step ends only by saying "we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs."  But that final clause is hardly elaborated upon at all!  We don't know what shape it will take in any individual life - only that it's part of the A.A. (suggested!) way of life.   In other words:  here's the way it works as you get sober.  Use these steps - and then get back to living, where you'll be able to use them as a lens for focusing your own experience, and as a guide.  We don't know what you'll meet up with - but we think they ought to work in all sorts of situations.

And that open-endedness is exciting.   It makes living on in sobriety an adventure - and one that is unique for each person.

Alison continues:

When it comes to seeing the Church as half-way house, however, something much weirder is going on, something requiring a much greater rupture in our imagination. Because the image starts from the recognition that everyone is in prison, and no one has ever had a previous regular normal life on the outside. In fact, of ourselves, we would not even know that there was such a thing as life on the outside, let alone that it might be available for us, and that we can be, as it were, retro-fitted for it.

And here of course is what is odd: when everyone is in prison, and always has been, and it is the only reality that everyone knows, then of course it doesn’t appear to anyone that they are in prison. What they are is normal, and life just is what it is. Remember how long it took Jim Carrey in The Truman Show to learn that there was an “outside” to his “normal” world? It is only when such people receive a communication from someone who is not in prison that they learn that they are in prison. A communication from someone who is entirely outside their social and cultural world: someone who offers signs of being from somewhere else, and of there actually being a somewhere else which is in fact more truly where all those who are in prison are from and for which they are capable of being re-fitted.

Now please notice the shocking quality of the act of communication: the Good News that you needn’t be in prison and weren’t made for prison inevitably also communicates the beginnings of an awareness that what you regard as normal may more properly be characterised as “being in prison”. This awareness, and the new characterisation of your situation which comes with it, an awareness which depends entirely on your taking on board a regard from outside, may be perceived as quite intolerable!

Well this of course is what is central to imagining Church. As humans we were quite literally unable to begin to imagine that there might be such a thing as life not run by death. All of our presuppositions are death-laden ones in ways which we couldn’t even recognise as such until something that wasn’t part of our culture structured by death unfurled itself in our midst. It was unimaginable that what seemed to us to be simply normal might in fact be a symptom of our having become trapped in something less than ourselves. And yet that is what the entire burden of our Forgiving Victim course has been: we are being inducted into becoming able to imagine the deathless one unfurling deathlessness as a human life story in our midst in such a way that we can share it and begin to participate in a deathless sociality as that for which we were really made.

Given this, I hope you can see that whereas an ordinary half-way house is a comparatively banal conduit between two social realities, the unfurling of the beginnings of a deathless sociality and the possibility of our being inducted into it, in the midst of our death-run culture, implies much more of a rupture. A shuttle docking at the International Space Station to take the astronauts who’ve been spending a few months there back to Earth is experienced by the astronauts as part of a certain continuity. However a portal from another universe opening itself up over the White House lawn and beginning to communicate with us about taking us into the other universe, asking us to trust that that universe is more fully our home than the one we know, is much more of a shake-up.

Yet this latter picture is the more accurate analogy with Church: a completely unknown social reality has started to instantiate itself in our midst, thus entirely altering our understanding of the social reality which we took for normal. It is one thing to know where you are, and know that there is an elsewhere, and that there is a way to get adapted to life elsewhere. It is quite another when a previously unknown “elsewhere” turns up and is just there, making elsewhere available to you starting now. Where you are, what you are used to, is now completely and shockingly relativized. So in this way the Church is quite unlike most half-way houses. The very fact of its existence, which is the same as the beginnings of the new form of living together which it contains, is already an irruption of elsewhere. It is a reality-altering statement, or sign, of an unimaginably powerful “just there” alongside, and breaking into, what we had taken for granted as normal.

I hope it is by now clear quite how different the same reality can look, depending on where you find yourself as it arrives. Those who share our culture are perfectly at liberty to see it as not a half-way house at all. The portal that has opened up on the lawn does look remarkably like a dead criminal, executed under shameful circumstances. A failure like that scarcely seems like an act of communication, much less an opening into a richer universe that is just there, palpitating alongside our own.

And this, I think, is what Father Paissy meant when he said "the State is transformed into the church."

Well, all that is really hopeful - but it seems so far from reality. I would like it to be true, but it doesn't seem to be.  I've almost completely left the church now physically - I've gone to only about 5 services in over a year - after having left it mentally some time ago.   I'm still following along with the church year and the readings and the music, which still does what it's supposed to do (at least for me).

I can't seem to live in the reality any longer, though; I react very badly at the moment to any anti-gay remarks I hear - and they keep on coming inside the church, even as things are getting so much better elsewhere.  I mean:  my Christian relatives are now posting anti-gay propaganda on Facebook, along with Bible quotes and lectures about "hating the sin and loving the sinner"; I've had to unsubscribe from my own family members just so I can have a tiny bit of rest from this stuff.   (And the only reason, really, I like Facebook at all is that I can keep up with what these same family members are doing - but I frankly just don't want to be looking at false claims that gay people are all crazy, all justified by "I have God and the truth on my side" argumentation, every time I log in.)    This is just not a good place for me to be - and it's not just the anti-gay church, either.  I feel there's no real support of any kind in the church at the moment; it's far more "culture war" than "spiritual succor," in every way and on all sides.   And what, I ask, is the point of that?  I can get that anywhere. 

The problem is that I really do agree with Alison and Father Paissy - I think they are entirely right about the role of the church - that it's an alternate reality and a "portal" to another way of life - yet I can't live comfortably in the current environment.  I would like to be an adept and a Father Zossima-like elder - but I'm just way too angry about the homophobia, and it simply ruins me for adept-hood.  And to be honest, I resent that, too.  I resent that people seem so completely unable to see what they're doing - cutting gay people off from God and the Christian spiritual life! - and I resent that I cannot be in equanimity about this.  I resent that these people are ruining my own spiritual balance  - although of course it's my own fault and my own problem; I should be able to keep balance, but I'm just not in a place where I can right now.

In fact, I can stand everything except the church right now.   I just don't feel I can live with or in it any longer.   So basically:  I'm out, unless and until that changes - and honestly, I don't see much of this changing within my lifetime. I'm a Christian-without-portfolio now; I'm unsubscribing to the institutional church.

There's a funny bit at the start of this James Alison article, using the image of the Church as a wonderful restaurant, with a Head Chef who wants all the guests to be fed marvelous food.  It's just that the waiters seems to think it's all about them, and offer their own very limited menu selections - and sneer that certain people shouldn't be eating there at all.  Maybe I'll post next on that!

BTW, there's now a "Forgiving Victim" website, and there are lots of retreats being offered at which this course is taught.  It seems to be "rolling out" right now, and there are retreats this weekend and next (in Chicago and Houston, I think).    I've been wondering for years why this stuff isn't discussed on the parish level - and that seems to be the aim here.  I'd definitely love to attend one of these retreats myself, even if I'm not part of the church anymore....