"Sacrifice, Law and the Catholic Faith": Sacrifice (Part II)

Here's more from James Alison's lecture; Click these links for Parts I, III, IV, and V.

This part is tremendous, and explains utterly clearly why "sacrifice" is a key concept in Christianity - something that can't be jettisoned without changing the faith's entire raison d'etre - and for reasons I don't know that anybody's articulated before (although of course I could be wrong about that!). 

I'm particularly blown away by this section:   "As Catholics we carry around with us, as it were, a mobile crime scene, in the form of the Mass. Please remember that the structure of the Mass is suspended halfway between being an ancient sacrifice or murder, and a modern community meal. And taking advantage of that suspended state, the One who constantly wants to get through to us so that we can be free, makes the sign alive, empowers it to be both the remembrance and the actual living presence of “the Happening”. This is so that we can simultaneously undergo being set free from fear and death, and enabled to stretch out in a new set of interpersonal relationships. In other words, what we have as the source of holiness is the portable crime scene which encourages the happening to incarnate itself in us again, to keep us constantly undergoing that crime scene."

So, here's the whole thing:

Sacrifice

As far as I can tell it is the Catholic understanding that the best shorthand to describe the “happening” is to call it a sacrifice. The “happening” consisted in the complex, and mobile event of God himself coming into our world as an act of communication with us which was designed to show that the Creator of all things likes us and wants to prove to us that He can be trusted as wanting our good, wanting us to be free and to share his life. He set about proving his goodness, his “not out to get you” nature by offering himself to us, in what looked like something entirely familiar to us, a sacrifice.

However, this sacrifice was curiously subverted: instead of it being us offering something to God, it was God offering himself to us. What God was doing was in fact showing us what we do when we sacrifice: ultimately we kill another human being as a way of keeping ourselves feeling safe, secure and good, dressing up a murder as something holy. And the point of God’s act of communication was not to leave us feeling “accused” by this piece of knowledge of what we are like, but to show us instead that though we are inclined to behave like that, we aren’t really like that, needn’t be like that, and that if only we will let go of the world of false security and group self-congratulation at having “got” the bad guy, we can be moved into a much bigger world, one in which we can be free, not frightened of dying, not having to grasp at security, but able to trust in a benevolence that wishes to take us into something much more alive than we can imagine. As we allow ourselves so to be moved, so we will discover amazing new and liberating possibilities of life together –including new scientific possibilities – which we just couldn’t have imagined while “hunting for another victim to sacrifice” seemed to be the solution to our problems.

Now this is a very complex “Happening”. It involves a particular historical act by a particular historical protagonist –a going to be crucified, a dying, and then a being seen in an identifiable but mysterious form, an act both drawing from, and making newly available, an inherited network of texts and interpretations and a network of interpersonal relationships among those chosen to be witnesses. And the evidence we have of this hugely complex, dynamic, meaning-stretching happening, is the pock-marked barn wall of the texts of Scripture. These only make sense at all in as far as they enable us to begin to sense the parameters of the sheer richness, fullness and dynamic nature of the happening whose symptom they are, and then reimagine ourselves undergoing that same happening which is working itself out in our midst, in our culture, and in our language.

I have emphasized this because the Happening is, in principle, relatively free from the words which are the pattern of bullet holes it has produced. The texts of the Apostolic Witness are not the centre of the Happening itself, they are the evidence from which the shape and dynamic of the happening can be scoped out and understood by us. But in principle, the same happening can happen anywhere where the same human dynamic of sacrifice is available to be subverted from within. In other words, the act of divine communication that is at the root of our Faith is a radical interruption of, and reinterpretation of, a key element of human culture which is present, as far as we know, wherever there are humans. That element is our tendency to create group unity, togetherness, and survival by resolving conflict through an all-against one which brings peace and unity to the group at the expense of someone, or some group, held to be evil. Every culture will partially hide, and partially describe what it is doing, and will use different words to justify its group unity over against another. So in every culture, the linguistic bullet marks of the Happening as it unfolds in the midst of that culture will be different, but the dynamic of the Happening will be the same, and we will know it by comparing the normative pattern of bullet holes seen in our New Testament barn with the pattern of bullet holes as they emerge in the cultures concerned.

In other words: the Catholic faith is of its nature syncretistic. Whatever culture it comes across, it will gradually subvert and change from within. This it does not by imposing a set of laws, texts, or norms, not by making a particular set of words, or a particular language sacred and thus normative. Rather it does this by making available the “happening” through preaching, liturgy and example in such a way that whatever is “sacred”, or taboo, or demanding of sacrifice in that culture ceases to have a hold on people as they come to lose their fear of death. This is when they start to be able to witness to the freedom that comes when one is no longer run by death and its fear, when one is able to make plans for people’s long term good lasting beyond one’s own lifespan, and when one is not afraid to stand up against sacred consensus in order to make truth available.

Please notice what this means: in any seriously “religious” culture, the Catholic faith will, quite properly, be regarded as “not religious enough”. Inevitably, as the Catholic faith permeates, various things will start to become unimportant: there will no longer be any good reasons for sacred rules concerning food, for particular sorts of food which may not be eaten, or for special cultic killing rites for meat, no religiously required forms of dress [4], no impurity or impropriety concerning women’s menstrual cycles. It is not that these things will suddenly be abolished, but that in every case the same realities will gradually come to be looked at differently: is such and such a food good for you, or for us; is such and such a form of dress appropriate? Might we not agree on such and such a communal fast for those strong enough to do so? In other words, it is the pattern of desire at work in us: whether we are seeking attention or acting modestly, whether we are deliberately scandalizing and provoking those of bound conscience, or trying to help them move beyond their fears, whether we are strengthening our desire for God through prayer or fasting but without seeking to impress anyone with our holiness. This pattern of desire becomes the central thing to which we attend. It may very well have outward forms, but it is the pattern of desire, and not the outward form in itself which matters.

Phrases like “‘everything is permitted’, – but not everything is convenient” or “to those who are pure, everything is pure” or “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” could be quoted by anybody, and they sound the rankest of secularising remarks. And they are. They are all phrases by which Paul sought to make the oddity of the un-religion which he was preaching available to people (1 Cor 6,12; Tit 1,15; 2 Cor 3,6): the subversiveness of the pattern of desire unleashed by the sacrificial death of Christ proving God’s goodness to us when faced with any “sacred” religious observance.

As Catholics we carry around with us, as it were, a mobile crime scene, in the form of the Mass. Please remember that the structure of the Mass is suspended halfway between being an ancient sacrifice or murder, and a modern community meal. And taking advantage of that suspended state, the One who constantly wants to get through to us so that we can be free, makes the sign alive, empowers it to be both the remembrance and the actual living presence of “the Happening”. This is so that we can simultaneously undergo being set free from fear and death, and enabled to stretch out in a new set of interpersonal relationships. In other words, what we have as the source of holiness is the portable crime scene which encourages the happening to incarnate itself in us again, to keep us constantly undergoing that crime scene.

Now this centrality of a flexible form of worship which acts as a sign of the “happening-having-happened” happening again in our midst is as vital for what it is not as for what it is. It is not a text. It is not a law. We are not a people of the book. We are a people of Spirit and Sign. And the criterion we have for who God is and what God is like is given us by God doing something in our midst as human, something detectable at a purely anthropological level, something in flexible imitation of which we are invited to be swept up.

Here is what is bizarre: any normal account of the “secular” would posit that the world of sacrifice is the direct opposite to the world of the secular. And that a religion based on a text or a law is much more likely to be secular than one based on a sacrifice. In fact, the reverse is true: unless you face up to the universality of the human tendency to scapegoat and sacrifice, text and law will merely create new forms of sacred as you impose them on others, and become much more tough, rigorous and likely to sacrifice those who fall foul of them. If you do face up to the universality of the human tendency to sacrifice, then any text and law you have will gradually come to be interpreted by your facing up to that tendency, and so will become comparatively toothless.

This is for the simple reason that the more you resist the tendency to sacrifice, the more the interpersonal relationships within your group will be de-sacralized, and the more it will become possible to learn who people really are. If you simply replace sacrifice with a book, you will recreate the same dynamics of sacrifice within your group, sanctifying those dynamics with the words of your text, while hiding from yourself that you are involved in sacrifice. If we have Jesus giving himself to us as sacrificed out of love constantly before our eyes, then there is a goodish chance that we will remember how prone we are to participating in such things. If instead of that, we say “that’s over – now I’ll go by the book”, then we may fall into the terrible trap of seeing ourselves as the righteous, and others who don’t go by the book as outsiders, sinners, and so on. In other words, we will participate in the creation of a new sacred instead of allowing the Holy One to make us ordinarily holy. This ordinary holiness is found in the changing of our pattern of desire in the midst of the new time that has been brought about by the gradual undoing of the violent sacred.

So please remember this: the Catholic faith is not a rival sacrificial system among many. It is the undoing from within of all sacrificial systems wherever they may be.


[4] It may, for instance, be perfectly reasonable to fight for the civil right to wear, or not to be forced to wear, a particular item of clothing or jewellery – a crucifix for example – in this or that public forum. But since Christian faith makes no demands concerning what we wear it would be misleading to claim that it is an infringement of the Christian faith that someone be prohibited from wearing a particular article of clothing or jewellery.