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....

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

This is the final section of the 2006 James Alison lecture;  See also Parts I, II, III, and IV.

Desire

Well, there is much, much more to say in this vein – I would love to have developed more fully the secularising effect in our midst of the doctrine of Creation as made full and complete by Christ, but time and space will not allow it. What I hope to have done is merely reminded you of something counterintuitive: that anything solid and lasting in what we call Enlightenment values of liberty, equality, fraternity and the birth of the scientific spirit comes from a quite specific set of circumstances, brought into being and kept fragilely alive, with many a betrayal and backwards step, by the Happening that is at the root of Catholic Faith. It is the keeping alive of the sacrifice having happened in our midst, the imperative not to do it again, and the realisation that it is only by creating social forms of togetherness such that we do not automatically resolve things by scapegoating, that we can have the space and freedom to discover and work out how our world really works. In other words, our ability to overcome scapegoating by having been empowered to live as if death were not, the realisation that this means one can stand up for the unpopular in order to make the truth shine, and our having started to forge a culture where this is a matter of common sense, this is a necessary precondition for science, for knowledge, and for the possibility of humans coming to live together universally.

Of course, the downside of all this is that the Happening is not our invention, and the power which has undone the roots of our scapegoating culture is not our own. The normal results of the undoing of a scapegoating culture, or of a system of goodness, is wrath, anger, and violence out of control. Because the fragile bulwarks which held that society together have been undone, and there is less and less belief in the authentic “sacredness” of whatever might put them together again. In the midst of this, the slow, patient forging of holy desire, and of the intermediary, negotiable institutions which encourage peace and foment flourishing, is very difficult, and very fragile. We are quite extraordinarily lucky to find ourselves on the inside of the Happening. The Catholic Faith enables us to navigate the wrath which is produced as sacred structures and boundaries collapse from within and a new creation emerges. How we make available to others the uniqueness of this strangely un-religious gift without falling into the trap of allowing that uniqueness to seem like merely another rival form of exclusivity is one of the great challenges of living and preaching the faith in our time.

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

More from the 2006 lecture by James Alison;  see also Parts I, II, III, and V.

Faith

Again, it is difficult to imagine that it should be faith that is the gateway to a relatively benign secularity. Faith, surely, is the ultimate Sacred Ideology to be held to by those creating religious forms of togetherness and those who are in or out. But again, this is not so! The word “faith” has come to stand in for “religion” which is a blinding muddle. For most religions faith is not particularly important. It is some or other form of practise, or act of acceptance which is important. That the centrepiece of the Catholic Faith should be exactly that, faith, a habitual confidence given us by Another in whose hands we can relax, is something far too little commented on. It means that what causes us to belong is a pattern of desire produced in us by someone we cannot see who is giving us the strength to live in the midst of this world as though death were not. And the access to this faith is desire: that we should want the gift of eternal life. It is the giving to us of this desire which we normally celebrate with that inverted religious rite called Baptism. In this rite we agree to undergo death in advance so as to live thereafter with death behind us. It is an inverted religious rite since it is not the crowd which gathers to drown the victim, but the candidate, not frightened of becoming a victim, who walks through the waters of being drowned so as to emerge on the other side into the welcome of those who are already living with death behind them.

It is for this reason, being dead in advance, that with Baptism there comes a complete loss of identity given by any human forms of belonging: your parents are now your brother and sister in Christ; the only form of hierarchy which need matter to you is the hierarchy of service made available through signed members of the community you are joining (made available by us signed-ones more or less incompetently to be sure, and with greater or lesser admixtures of an ability to relativise the way the world does “power”). You have no King but Jesus, no Prophet but Jesus and no Priest but Jesus. And Jesus was a crucified criminal. Now you share that kingship, that gift of prophecy and that priesthood. Indeed you are charged to make it present in the world by yourself incarnating and recreating the “happening” which we looked at earlier.

But this means that no form of earthly belonging is sacred: your family, your tribe, your clan is not sacred, and you may have to stand up against it in order to live the truth; your homeland is not sacred, and you may have to be considered a criminal or a traitor by it in order to live the truth. Your only form of belonging is invisible except by sign. It is for this reason that there is no Christian Holy Land, only lands where the usual mixture of holiness and destruction is lived out, but where political frontiers can only be pragmatic matters, able to be negotiated over time, never sacred ones. There is no Christian Holy City, Rome’s status being a purely historical and pragmatic one, and there being absolutely no sacred imperative that the Bishop of the Church in that city should also be a secular head of state. There are purely contingent and pragmatic considerations, always up for negotiation. It is genuinely indispensable to being a Catholic that we have a direct relationship to the successor of Peter. Yet that relationship is in principle entirely independent of whatever secular power structure adorns, or blackens, the Petrine office. And it is quite right that it should be secular affairs which give the context within which our relationship to Peter is lived out in each generation. The same reasoning lies behind the fact that there is no Christian Ummah – not because the West is somehow enlightened, decadent, and has lost its religious roots, meaning the remnants of Christendom, but because the whole point of Christianity is to bring down the sort of wall of protective sacredness which makes universality impossible by having a necessary “other” over against whom we make ourselves “good”.

The premise of the Catholic faith is that there is no real other in any meaningful religious sense, that is “another” who can be seen as so unlike us that they could not learn as we have learned, that we are victimizers and must learn not to be, and so belong to the same sign as we. There are only humans, who, starting from where they are can have desire reformed in such a way as to learn not to create identity over against anyone else at all.

Whenever we come across an apparent “other” and start to get frightened and retrench into identity politics, we are not becoming more Catholic, but much less Catholic. My sorrow at Archbishop Nichols’ recent sermon seeking to maintain a sacred right to discriminate against gay people was not because I am a gay man, but because I’m a Catholic. It is because I am a Catholic that I recognise that anyone playing identity politics with a victimary slant is functionally atheistic.

Is not identity politics a refusal to allow ourselves to undergo the Happening which might teach us who our neighbour is, and empower us to grow into being not-over-against-anyone at all? Doesn’t such politics tend to produce cheap togetherness and junk goodness? When I see this identity politics with a victimary slant from other groups in our society, – and Lord alone knows there are enough of them from throughout the spheres which we call “religious” and “secular”, both left and right -, I’m sorry for them, but how can I judge whether they know better? They are genuinely sheep without a shepherd. But when I see a Catholic authority doing this, I am really, really sorry, because we are without excuse. Catholics cannot complain about being treated victimarily, since at the centre of our Faith we have agreed to be treated victimarily in advance, without ever seeking it, so as to be able slowly and patiently to work towards the truth and wellbeing of all our sisters and brothers with all that victim stuff already behind us. We’ve agreed to lose our identity in advance so as to receive the much, much bigger, stronger identity of being contributed to by others who, whatever they may think, are not really over-against me at all. That’s what “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” means!

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

More from this wonderful 2006 lecture by James Alison; here are Parts I, II, IV, and V.

Mockingbirds will like this section!

Law

Another way of looking at the same dynamic is to look at Law. One of the first pieces of evidence that the Happening had happened was that it became possible to detect that systems of goodness are terribly dangerous things. This was Paul’s great insight concerning the Law. He wasn’t being anti-semitic. The space created by his own relationship to Torah was merely the particular barn within which the bullet marks of the Happening had happened. He had perceived something about all sacred systems of goodness. And this is that they are traps. A system of goodness works by having rules which determine who is in and who is out. If some of the rules are hard to keep so much the better, since that gives the impression that what is in fact a tragically easy form of goodness is, rather, heroically difficult. Paul’s insight is that systems of goodness do not counteract people’s desires which are run according to the familiar mechanism of gathering people into unanimity against an evil one to be expelled. On the contrary, systems of goodness depend on that mechanism, and tragically easily they fall prey to it, so that the most “virtuous” within systems of goodness become those clearest about who is in and who is out.

What Paul understood from this is that in practice systems of goodness which give the impression of being chosen voluntarily do not really work that way. Their adherents are driven by them and become functions of the crystallized group violence which underlies them. So you get people who want to be good, and know that goodness looks like loving your neighbour as yourself, but because they are trapped in a system of goodness, they become unable to see their neighbour as themselves, and end up in fact hating their neighbour and perceiving them as something unclean, or outside, or not quite human, so as to be able not to love them as themselves. This is how you end up with people who are convinced that their religion is a religion of peace, yet who are quite unaware of how completely the system of goodness of which they are part jerks them about. This system makes them, in fact, incapable of creating peace. Paul discovered this very clearly (Rom 7,19):

For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.

Here he is talking quite specifically about how the system of goodness runs people, and also about how the only way out of it is the realisation that because God had occupied the place of one “cursed by the Law” by undergoing the death of a despised criminal, the system of goodness has been rendered moot for ever. From now on the shape of goodness is the slow learning how to live without being dependent on a system of goodness. It involves instead our becoming aware of how much we have been loved by someone who is our victim. Because of that we can become good as we are loved in our most vulnerable places, rather than by forcing ourselves to cover up our vulnerability and be good so as to be loved. This means that the only sort of goodness we know is that of the penitent. It is only as undergoing being forgiven that we can possibly start to be good. And that means being daringly patient about forgiving others, not holding things against them, seeing them as the same as us before offering to put them right and so on. This means that over time we can actually learn that some things that seemed to us to be good and holy and just are not so, and some things that seemed to us to be impure and evil and profane are not so. And this is because the question of whether we are allowing ourselves to be forgiven by our victim, and whether, in the light of that forgiveness, we are learning to treat our neighbour as though we are the same as they are, this question gradually comes to supersede all other questions of morality which a system of goodness would impose on us.

Let me give you both an ancient and a modern example. It might surprise you to know that the first written records we have in European history of people standing out against, and questioning Witch trials came not from enlightened sceptics but from people whose religious understanding led them to be highly sceptical of the craziness of the systems of goodness which were leading people to the pyre. Of the first four voices, two (1549 and 1612) were Spanish Inquisitors who understood perfectly well that their job was to introduce the boring secularism of due process into areas which would otherwise have tended to exciting lynch deaths. These Inquisitors would have been considered “not sufficiently religious” by those at the time who were run by systems of goodness. Those for whom belief in the real evil of the witches was at that time what belief in the magical capacity of gay people to destroy the fabric of society is now: the dividing line between “true believers” and the advancing secularity offered by the due processes inspired by Catholic faith. The truth was that the Inquisitors knew, within all the limitations of their time, that goodness after Christ’s sacrifice looks like introducing boring intermediary forms of process and protection, and insisting on rules of evidence other than what is derived from torture, given how easy it is for us to ignore that Christ’s sacrifice has happened and instead to recreate it in a dangerous bid for goodness.

For a more modern example, look at the pictures recently published in the US media of José Padilla [5]. This man, a full US citizen who is a Muslim, has been arrested, held without proper charge or trial for several years in a US prison, tortured, incarcerated, and treated as though he were toxic waste by the American legal system, at the instigation of that champion of a system of goodness John Ashcroft. All the evidence which was produced against him has been revealed to have been fabricated so as to give the Administration the electorally convenient weapon of “a Muslim manufacturing a dirty bomb”. So much has the balance of his mind been altered by the torture and deprivation that he has suffered that although it is clear that none of the evidence against him has stood up, it is not at all clear that he will ever be able to tell his own story or mount a defence. The reason I ask you to look at a picture of him, going back to websites in order to do so, is that of the pictures of him that have been released, one stands out. It shows him chained, handcuffed in an orange jumpsuit, with goggles on (apparently so that he can’t blink some signal in code to his alleged Al Quaeda colleagues). It shows him being pushed around by some quite extraordinarily overdressed and overarmed military figures, who look as though they have just rushed into a scene of extreme danger. In fact they are about to escort a totally helpless, mentally unstable, rather small man towards a visit to the dentist in a prison in South Carolina. But what leaps out about the photograph is that it is exactly the same picture as a mediaeval representation of Christ being blindfolded, tortured, and beaten by the Roman soldiers in Pilate’s palace.

Anyone who sees that, knows what is going on: a terrible system of goodness is torturing and destroying someone for whom Christ died, yet it is the cursed one to whom we must reach out. It doesn’t matter whether he is a Muslim, or a Jew, a Hindu, a Christian, a Communist. He is the one who is our neighbour because he is ourself. It doesn’t matter whether he would do the same to us if he had the chance. It matters terribly that we recognise that all systems of goodness have been interrupted by Christ, and that the apparent secularity, the boring due process, of the justice system seems to have been suspended by those who, thinking themselves good, are in fact being run by the evil of a sacred system of goodness to produce the usual, lethal, sacred results. And it matters not only for Mr Padilla, but it matters for all of us: for as long as we continue to find, torture and blame people like him, just so long will we remain in ignorance of what the real threats and dangers to any of our societies might be, and unable to take the small scale, rational, proper precautionary measures to protect ourselves and others.

So, please remember this, the Catholic faith is not a system of goodness. It is the introduction into the world of a constant undoing of all and any systems of goodness such that a genuine, difficult, tentative goodness can begin to be elaborated by those who are becoming aware of how terribly dangerous “goodness” and our need for it is. But the perception that systems of goodness are terribly dangerous, and our very proper modern suspicion of them: these are not enlightened, sceptical positions. They are the working out, over the time in which we have learned to suspend easy sacred solutions, of a quite specific divinely-given tradition: the Catholic faith.

[5] Hose Padilla In Chains, The Smoking Gun, [04.12.2006].

"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. 

"Sacrifice, Law and the Catholic Faith: is secularity really the enemy?": Intro (Part I)

A truly brilliant piece of thinking from James Alison; this one comes from way back in 2006 in a Lecture sponsored by The Tablet, a "British Catholic weekly journal."

I'm going to put up almost the whole article, in several posts, and then return and comment on each section.   Alison has made what I think are some really important points here and I'd like to think more about them and talk about them.   See also Parts II, III, IV and V.

BTW, I left out a section that contains Footnotes 2 and 3 - links to talks on secularism by Rowan Williams, (Secularism, Faith and Freedom) and Benedict XVI (Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections).  I haven't read these - "secularism" isn't actually my central concern here in fact! - but do plan to.


Anyway, here's the first part of the piece:

When [the editor of The Tablet and I] met .... in August, to talk over possible subjects, I suggested that I would like to talk about something which seemed to be missing in current public discourse. This is the way in which, contrary to easy talk about “rampant secularism” and “shoring up our religious identity”, it is and always has been a proper part of the Catholic faith, and the life of the Church, that it tends to generate a relatively benign secularity; that far from the “secular” being our “enemy” it is in fact our “baby”. And a fragile baby, one whose birth and development is well worth protecting. Nowadays our contemporaries are inclined to use the word “religious” as though it were synonymous with the word “sacred”, and the word “secular” as though it were synonymous with “common”, “normal” or “profane”. Nevertheless to regard those definitions as fixed is, I’m afraid, the result of a mixture of historical ignorance, cultural tone-deafness and the fact that thinking in dichotomies is a great deal easier than anything more subtle.

In fact the concept of the “secular” as it comes to us from St Augustine was born as a new form of historical time and culture brought into being by Christian faith in which there is no longer anything or any people who are properly “sacred” or anything or any people who are properly “profane” [1].

Instead there is a time when the patterns of desire leading to holiness and patterns of desire leading to destruction are to be found side by side, intertwined, and not to be uprooted by human agencies. They are present both in apparently “ecclesiastical” and in apparently “civil” spheres. The Church, which, with regard to its varying organisational structures, is as much part of the secular as is the civil, political, imperial, or democratic realm in which it lives, would, at its best, be the regime and discipline of signs, made alive by God. Signs pointing towards and actually being, God’s bringing about of his Kingdom by reconciling all humans together. Signs which are aimed at summoning forth certain shapes of human desire, interpretation, and living together, rather than coercing people into sacred structures. The driving force behind this is the Spirit breathed forth by Jesus in his dying. This alone, this breath of a crucified criminal, injustly put to death by the breathing together, the con-spiratio, of the sacred and the profane authorities of the time, this breath which cannot be tied down, is the holy power which turns apparent dregs of failed humanity into astounding witnesses of the holiness of God.

....

Happening

I would like to start in the least promising of places to begin an approach to secularity: by claiming that the centrepiece of the Catholic Faith is a divine happening breaking through into our scheme of things in the form of a very particular sort of Priest performing a very particular sort of Sacrifice and thus opening up a New Creation. This does not at all sound like secular language. So, in order to envisage with you where our perception of this happening leads us, I would ask you to imagine a crime scene in an American Cop show. And while scenarios of this sort are common to many such shows, I myself am thinking of a particular episode of the series called “CSI: Las Vegas”. In this episode, our investigators are called to a large, almost empty barn, riddled with bullet holes from high up on all four walls right down to floor level. On the floor there is the body of a teenager, very recently dead. Our investigators’ job is to piece together what happened so as to hold somebody accountable. They do the classic thing, tracing back from the bullet holes in the walls so as to pinpoint where the gun was fired from, using a mixture of rods and laser beams. The first problem they discover is that the bullet which went through the standing teenager and then hit the barn wall was clearly coming at a steep downward angle passing through him, and then hitting the wall somewhere below his standing height. In other words, the bullet had to have been fired from above the boy, from considerably higher, in fact than any other human could have fired, unless they were standing on some structure in the middle of the floor. But there is no forensic evidence of any such structure having stood in the middle of the floor. At this stage, a trigger-happy Tyrannosaurus Rex would just about fit the crime scene, but little else.

It then becomes clear that, though there is no structure standing in the middle, the bullets were all fired from different heights, some downwards, and some upwards, but all from roughly the middle of the barn. However there is no platform, let alone a moving platform, upon which someone might have stood to fire the bullets, nor was there time to remove such a platform between the boy’s death and the arrival of the investigators.

Finally, the investigators find some evidence that friends of the boy were at the barn with him. Through tracing them, questioning them, and breaking through their lies and cover up, the investigators are able to work out and envisage exactly what happened. The kids were playing a game of “dare”. The dare consisted of one of them climbing up onto the roof of the barn, and then lowering down a twisted rope from a hole in the ceiling. This youth then allowed a machine gun, with its trigger jammed into firing mode to spin down the rope, jerking slightly as it moved, and spraying the walls all the way round as it moved down. The other kids, so as to avoid being “chicken”, had to stand, or dance around, on the floor of the barn, “dodging” the random bullets. Amazingly, only one of them was killed. In other words, the investigators are able to determine that the “happening” which they are investigating was not a murder, but an accident in the midst of a crazily dangerous form of “extreme adolescent dares”.

Now the reason I tell you this story is because of the analogy which it offers. What we have, at the root of our Faith is the claim that something happened in the midst of a group of humans. Something huge, scarcely able to be put into words, something breaking through normal schemes of description, and something seen as opening up an entirely new perspective on being human.

Such a happening is too mobile and subtle to be seen in itself, it can only be detected in the various bits of evidence it left behind. In our Cop Show scenario it was impossible for the Crime Scene Investigators to see “the happening which had happened” in itself, they had to use a mixture of the forensic evidence and the effects on the emotional lives of the friends of the dead boy to posit as the most rational, and ultimately the true, explanation, a highly complex, evolving, and mobile “happening”, which they could then repeat if they wished, to see whether it did in fact have the effects which, according to their reconstruction it should have. Just so, the “happening” itself which is the root of our Faith cannot be seen in itself. It can be glimpsed and posited through a mixture of the patterns of bullet holes peppered on the walls, which we have in the words of the Apostolic Witness-put-into-writing which we call the New Testament, and the effects in the lives of the witnesses themselves about which we know something from other sources.

Now I ask you to hold onto this analogy because it is very important indeed in order to understand the generative function of Catholic Faith that we be able to distinguish between the “happening” and what one might call the “crime scene”. It is important for us that once we have distinguished the happening, we be able to imagine it as something which can in principle be detached from that particular barn, that particular gun, those particular bullets, and those particular teenagers. In fact the “happening” can be reproduced wherever, and the original barn and evidence will be a normative pointer to whether we are right in detecting the happening at work again. This is what we mean when we talk about Christ giving the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit turning us into other Christs, summoning us into living the same happening in a wide variety of “pock marked barns”. If the dynamic of the happening in the new circumstances is such as to produce an analogous trail of evidence, we will know that we are indeed talking about the same happening. And if not, we will know that something else is going on, a different sort of happening not organically the same as our original happening, and not to be confused with it.


[1] For further reading on this see R.A. Markus’ Saeculum or his more recent Christianity and the secular.

More about "ego deflation at depth"

First, a correction: A.A., as an organization/entity, does not, it seems, itself use the phrase "ego deflation at depth" in any of its official literature.   That phrase was apparently used by Bill Wilson in a talk he gave before the New York City Medical Society on Alcoholism in 1958 - and he was referring, specifically, to the initial approach to the still-drinking alcoholic.

Here's the quote itself; Wilson's talking about an alcoholic patient of Carl Jung's - a man who had tried for many years to stop drink but had found it impossible.  (My bolding below.)

In substances, Dr. Jung said, "For some time after you came here, I continued to believe that you might be one of those rare cases who could make a recovery. But, I must now frankly admit that I have never seen a single case recover through the psychiatric art where the neurosis is so severe as yours. Medicine has done all that it can for you, and that’s where you stand.

Mr. R.’s depression deepened. He asked: "is there no exception; is this really the end of the line for me?"

"Well," replied the doctor, "There are some exceptions, a very few. Here and there, once in a while, alcoholics have had what are called vital spiritual experiences. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them. In fact, I have been trying to produce some such emotional rearrangement within you. With many types of neurotics, the methods which I employ are successful, but I have never been successful with an alcoholic of your description."

"But," protested the patient, "I’m a religious man, and I still have faith." To this Dr. Jung replied, "Ordinary religious faith isn’t enough. What I’m talking about is a transforming experience, a conversion experience, if you like. I can only recommend that you place yourself in the religious atmosphere of your own choice, that you recognize your personal hopelessness, and that you cast yourself upon whatever God you think there is. The lightening of the transforming experience may then strike you. This you must try- it is your only way out." So spoke a great and humble physician.

For the AA-to- be, this was a ten-strike. Science had pronounced Mr. R. virtually hopeless. Dr. Jung ‘ s words had struck him at great depth, producing an immense deflation of his ego. Deflation at depth is today a cornerstone principle of AA. There in Dr. Jung’s office it was first employed in our behalf.

(The Jung story is also found in Chapter 2 of the book Alcoholics Anonymous (PDF), AKA "The Big Book," originally published in 1939.  To my way of thinking, it's not really the discussion of a "transforming experience, a conversion experience" that's doing the work here; it's the simple, short statement at the end:  "It is your only way out," that does the job.)

Other sources say that William James is the one who first used the phrase - but I haven't found a citation to that effect.  In any case, the phrase is well-known in A.A. circles; it's very much part of the oral tradition.

And, of course, A.A.'s literature does say, in the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, that:

Step Three calls for affirmative action, for it is only by action that we can cut away the self-will which has always blocked the entry of God into our lives.

 And you'll find this passage (my bolding below) in this PDF copy of Chapter Five of the book Alcoholics Anonymous:

Our description of the alcoholic, the chapter to the agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after make clear three pertinent ideas:

a)  That we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives.
b)  That probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism.
c)  That God could and would if He were sought.

Being convinced, we were at Step Three, which is that we decided to turn our will and our life over to God as we understood Him. Just what do we mean by that, and just what do we do?

The first requirement is that we be convinced that any life run on self-will can hardly be a success. On that basis we are almost always in collision with something or somebody, even though our motives are good. Most people try to live by self-propulsion. Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way. If his arrangements would only stay put, if only people would do as he wished, the show would be great. Everybody, including himself, would be pleased. Life would be wonderful. In trying to make these arrangements our actor may sometimes be quite virtuous. He may be kind, considerate, patient, generous; even modest and self- sacrificing. On the other hand, he may be mean, egotistical, selfish and dishonest. But, as with most humans, he is more likely to have varied traits.

What usually happens? The show doesn't come off very well. He begins to think life doesn't treat him right. He decides to exert himself more. He becomes, on the next occasion, still more demanding or gracious, as the case may be. Still the play does not suit him. Admitting he may be somewhat at fault, he is sure that other people are more to blame. He becomes angry, indignant, self-pitying. What is his basic trouble? Is he not really a self-seeker even when trying to be kind? Is he not a victim of the delusion that he can wrest satisfaction and happiness out of this world if he only manages well? Is it not evident to all the rest of the players that these are the things he wants? And do not his actions make each of them wish to retaliate, snatching all they can get out of the show? Is he not, even in his best moments, a producer of confusion rather than harmony?

Our actor is self-centered — ego-centric, as people like to call it nowadays. He is like the retired business man who lolls in the Florida sunshine in the winter complaining of the sad state of the nation; the minister who sighs over the sins of the twentieth century; politicians and reformers who are sure all would be Utopia if the rest of the world would only behave; the outlaw safe cracker who thinks society has wronged him; and the alcoholic who has lost all and is locked up. Whatever our protestations, are not most of us concerned with ourselves, our resentments, or our self-pity?

Selfishness — self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate. Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt.

So our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making. They arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn't think so. Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kill us! God makes that possible. And there often seems no way of entirely getting rid of self without His aid. Many of us had moral and philosophical convictions galore, but we could not live up to them even though we would have liked to. Neither could we reduce our self-centeredness much by wishing or trying on our own power. We had to have God's help.

This is the how and the why of it. First of all, we had to quit playing God. It didn't work. Next, we decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director. He is the Principal; we are His agents. He is the Father, and we are His children. Most Good ideas are simple, and this concept was the keystone of the new and triumphant arch through which we passed to freedom. When we sincerely took such a position, all sorts of remarkable things followed. We had a new Employer. Being all powerful, He provided what we needed, if we kept close to Him and performed His work well. Established on such a footing we became less and less interested in ourselves, our own little plans and designs. More and more we became interested in seeing what we could contribute to life. As we felt new power flow in, as we enjoyed peace of mind, as we discovered we could face life successfully, as we became conscious of His presence, we began to lose our fear of today, tomorrow or the hereafter. We were reborn.

We were now at Step Three. Many of us said to our Maker, as we Understood Him: "God, I offer myself to Thee — to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life. May I do Thy will always!" We thought well before taking this step making sure we were ready; that we could at last abandon ourselves utterly to Him.”

 
So "ego deflation" - i.e., "the cutting away of self-will," at least, really is the entire A.A. project - even if the "at depth" part referred originally to the initial effort to break down the alcoholic's resistance utterly. 

Anyway:  I'm finding it very interesting to keep in mind, too, the way James Alison describes "the two approaches to desire" in his "Prayer: a case study in mimetic anthropology"  (again, with my emphases below):

First the folk-psychology approach, which I sometimes characterise as the “blob and arrow” understanding of desire. In this approach, there is a blob located somewhere within each one of us and normally referred to as a “self”. This more or less bloated entity is pretty stable, and there come forth from it arrows which aim at objects. So, “I” desire a car, a mate, a house, a holiday, some particular clothes and so on and so forth. The desire for the object comes from the “I” which originates it, and thus the desire is authentically and truly “mine”. If I desire the same thing as someone else this is either accidental and we must be rational about resolving any conflict which may arise, or it is a result of the other person imitating my desire, which is of course stronger and more authentic than their secondary and less worthy desire. Since my desiring self, my “I”, is basically rational, it follows that my desires are basically rational, and thus that I am unlike those people who I observe to have a clearly pathological pattern of desire – constantly falling for an unsuitable type of potential mate and banging their head against the consequences, or hooked on substances or patterns of behaviour that do them no good. Those people are in some way sick, and their desires escape the possibilities of rational discourse. Unlike me and my desires.

....

The understanding of desire which Girard has been putting forward for almost half a century, and which is often referred to as “mimetic” is about as far removed from this picture as you can get. The key phrase which I never tire of repeating is “We desire according to the desire of the other”. It is the social other, the social world which surrounds us, which moves us to desire, to want, and to act. This doesn’t sound particularly challenging when it is illustrated in the way the entertainment industry creates celebrities, or the advertising profession manages to make particular objects or brands desirable. For few of us are so grandiose as to deny that some of our desires show us as being easily led and susceptible to suggestion. It becomes much more challenging when it is claimed that in fact it is not some of our desires that are being talked about, but the whole way in which we humans are structured by desire.

For what Girard is pointing out is that humans are those animals in which even basic biological instincts (which of course exist, and are not the same thing as desire) are run by the social other within which the instinct-bearing body is born. In fact, our capacity to receive and deal with our instincts is given to us through our being drawn towards the social other which inducts us into living as this sort of animal, by reproducing itself within us. And what makes this draw possible is the hugely developed capacity for imitation which sets our species apart from our nearest simian relatives.

What both A.A. and James Alison/Rene Girard are pointing to is the effort to get the ego - otherwise known, in the Alison/Girard view, as the "the social other" that runs its desires - to let go of its stranglehold on our hearts, minds, and lives.   You can approach the problem from either direction, IOW - and the key to it seems to point to exactly the same idea.

And both, BTW, point to prayer as a vitally important key to and part of the process; at the heart of both approaches is the idea of beginning to listen to, as James Alison puts it, "another Other," and to 'allow the One who knows what is good for us, unlike we ourselves, whose desire is for us and for our fruition, unlike the social other and its violent traps, to gain access to re-creating us from within, to giving us a “self”, an “I of desire” that is in fact a constant flow of treasure.'  (Liturgists like Derek will agree with this, too, I'm sure; I think he'd argue that this is exactly what liturgy does.  It gives the  "other Other" voice, via liturgical poetry, music, texts, scripts, actions, and concepts - and frequent repetition of all of the above.)

And again, I argue:  that's what the church is for.  Because what human being doesn't, in his heart, long to truly live - and while she's at it, to find access to "a constant flow treasure," consolation in distress - and a blessed release from fear and all crippling negativity?

More about "ego deflation at depth"

First, a correction: A.A., as an organization/entity, does not, it seems, itself use the phrase "ego deflation at depth" in any of its official literature.   That phrase was apparently used by Bill Wilson in a talk he gave before the New York City Medical Society on Alcoholism in 1958 - and he was referring, specifically, to the initial approach to the still-drinking alcoholic.

Here's the quote itself; Wilson's talking about an alcoholic patient of Carl Jung's - a man who had tried for many years to stop drink but had found it impossible.  (My bolding below.)

In substances, Dr. Jung said, "For some time after you came here, I continued to believe that you might be one of those rare cases who could make a recovery. But, I must now frankly admit that I have never seen a single case recover through the psychiatric art where the neurosis is so severe as yours. Medicine has done all that it can for you, and that’s where you stand.

Mr. R.’s depression deepened. He asked: "is there no exception; is this really the end of the line for me?"

"Well," replied the doctor, "There are some exceptions, a very few. Here and there, once in a while, alcoholics have had what are called vital spiritual experiences. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them. In fact, I have been trying to produce some such emotional rearrangement within you. With many types of neurotics, the methods which I employ are successful, but I have never been successful with an alcoholic of your description."

"But," protested the patient, "I’m a religious man, and I still have faith." To this Dr. Jung replied, "Ordinary religious faith isn’t enough. What I’m talking about is a transforming experience, a conversion experience, if you like. I can only recommend that you place yourself in the religious atmosphere of your own choice, that you recognize your personal hopelessness, and that you cast yourself upon whatever God you think there is. The lightening of the transforming experience may then strike you. This you must try- it is your only way out." So spoke a great and humble physician.

For the AA-to- be, this was a ten-strike. Science had pronounced Mr. R. virtually hopeless. Dr. Jung ‘ s words had struck him at great depth, producing an immense deflation of his ego. Deflation at depth is today a cornerstone principle of AA. There in Dr. Jung’s office it was first employed in our behalf.

(The Jung story is also found in Chapter 2 of the book Alcoholics Anonymous (PDF), AKA "The Big Book," originally published in 1939.  To my way of thinking, it's not really the discussion of a "transforming experience, a conversion experience" that's doing the work here; it's the simple, short statement at the end:  "It is your only way out," that does the job.)

Other sources say that William James is the one who first used the phrase - but I haven't found a citation to that effect.  In any case, the phrase is well-known in A.A. circles; it's very much part of the oral tradition.

And, of course, A.A.'s literature does say, in the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, that:

Step Three calls for affirmative action, for it is only by action that we can cut away the self-will which has always blocked the entry of God into our lives.

 And you'll find this passage (my bolding below) in this PDF copy of Chapter Five of the book Alcoholics Anonymous:

Our description of the alcoholic, the chapter to the agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after make clear three pertinent ideas:

a)  That we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives.
b)  That probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism.
c)  That God could and would if He were sought.

Being convinced, we were at Step Three, which is that we decided to turn our will and our life over to God as we understood Him. Just what do we mean by that, and just what do we do?

The first requirement is that we be convinced that any life run on self-will can hardly be a success. On that basis we are almost always in collision with something or somebody, even though our motives are good. Most people try to live by self-propulsion. Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way. If his arrangements would only stay put, if only people would do as he wished, the show would be great. Everybody, including himself, would be pleased. Life would be wonderful. In trying to make these arrangements our actor may sometimes be quite virtuous. He may be kind, considerate, patient, generous; even modest and self- sacrificing. On the other hand, he may be mean, egotistical, selfish and dishonest. But, as with most humans, he is more likely to have varied traits.

What usually happens? The show doesn't come off very well. He begins to think life doesn't treat him right. He decides to exert himself more. He becomes, on the next occasion, still more demanding or gracious, as the case may be. Still the play does not suit him. Admitting he may be somewhat at fault, he is sure that other people are more to blame. He becomes angry, indignant, self-pitying. What is his basic trouble? Is he not really a self-seeker even when trying to be kind? Is he not a victim of the delusion that he can wrest satisfaction and happiness out of this world if he only manages well? Is it not evident to all the rest of the players that these are the things he wants? And do not his actions make each of them wish to retaliate, snatching all they can get out of the show? Is he not, even in his best moments, a producer of confusion rather than harmony?

Our actor is self-centered — ego-centric, as people like to call it nowadays. He is like the retired business man who lolls in the Florida sunshine in the winter complaining of the sad state of the nation; the minister who sighs over the sins of the twentieth century; politicians and reformers who are sure all would be Utopia if the rest of the world would only behave; the outlaw safe cracker who thinks society has wronged him; and the alcoholic who has lost all and is locked up. Whatever our protestations, are not most of us concerned with ourselves, our resentments, or our self-pity?

Selfishness — self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate. Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt.

So our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making. They arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn't think so. Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kill us! God makes that possible. And there often seems no way of entirely getting rid of self without His aid. Many of us had moral and philosophical convictions galore, but we could not live up to them even though we would have liked to. Neither could we reduce our self-centeredness much by wishing or trying on our own power. We had to have God's help.

This is the how and the why of it. First of all, we had to quit playing God. It didn't work. Next, we decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director. He is the Principal; we are His agents. He is the Father, and we are His children. Most Good ideas are simple, and this concept was the keystone of the new and triumphant arch through which we passed to freedom. When we sincerely took such a position, all sorts of remarkable things followed. We had a new Employer. Being all powerful, He provided what we needed, if we kept close to Him and performed His work well. Established on such a footing we became less and less interested in ourselves, our own little plans and designs. More and more we became interested in seeing what we could contribute to life. As we felt new power flow in, as we enjoyed peace of mind, as we discovered we could face life successfully, as we became conscious of His presence, we began to lose our fear of today, tomorrow or the hereafter. We were reborn.

We were now at Step Three. Many of us said to our Maker, as we Understood Him: "God, I offer myself to Thee — to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life. May I do Thy will always!" We thought well before taking this step making sure we were ready; that we could at last abandon ourselves utterly to Him.”

 
So "ego deflation" - i.e., "the cutting away of self-will," at least, really is the entire A.A. project - even if the "at depth" part referred originally to the initial effort to break down the alcoholic's resistance utterly. 

Anyway:  I'm finding it very interesting to keep in mind, too, the way James Alison describes "the two approaches to desire" in his "Prayer: a case study in mimetic anthropology"  (again, with my emphases below):

First the folk-psychology approach, which I sometimes characterise as the “blob and arrow” understanding of desire. In this approach, there is a blob located somewhere within each one of us and normally referred to as a “self”. This more or less bloated entity is pretty stable, and there come forth from it arrows which aim at objects. So, “I” desire a car, a mate, a house, a holiday, some particular clothes and so on and so forth. The desire for the object comes from the “I” which originates it, and thus the desire is authentically and truly “mine”. If I desire the same thing as someone else this is either accidental and we must be rational about resolving any conflict which may arise, or it is a result of the other person imitating my desire, which is of course stronger and more authentic than their secondary and less worthy desire. Since my desiring self, my “I”, is basically rational, it follows that my desires are basically rational, and thus that I am unlike those people who I observe to have a clearly pathological pattern of desire – constantly falling for an unsuitable type of potential mate and banging their head against the consequences, or hooked on substances or patterns of behaviour that do them no good. Those people are in some way sick, and their desires escape the possibilities of rational discourse. Unlike me and my desires.

....

The understanding of desire which Girard has been putting forward for almost half a century, and which is often referred to as “mimetic” is about as far removed from this picture as you can get. The key phrase which I never tire of repeating is “We desire according to the desire of the other”. It is the social other, the social world which surrounds us, which moves us to desire, to want, and to act. This doesn’t sound particularly challenging when it is illustrated in the way the entertainment industry creates celebrities, or the advertising profession manages to make particular objects or brands desirable. For few of us are so grandiose as to deny that some of our desires show us as being easily led and susceptible to suggestion. It becomes much more challenging when it is claimed that in fact it is not some of our desires that are being talked about, but the whole way in which we humans are structured by desire.

For what Girard is pointing out is that humans are those animals in which even basic biological instincts (which of course exist, and are not the same thing as desire) are run by the social other within which the instinct-bearing body is born. In fact, our capacity to receive and deal with our instincts is given to us through our being drawn towards the social other which inducts us into living as this sort of animal, by reproducing itself within us. And what makes this draw possible is the hugely developed capacity for imitation which sets our species apart from our nearest simian relatives.

What both A.A. and James Alison/Rene Girard are pointing to is the effort to get the ego - otherwise known, in the Alison/Girard view, as the "the social other" that runs its desires - to let go of its stranglehold on our hearts, minds, and lives.   You can approach the problem from either direction, IOW - and the key to it seems to point to exactly the same idea.

And both, BTW, point to prayer as a vitally important key to and part of the process; at the heart of both approaches is the idea of beginning to listen to, as James Alison puts it, "another Other," and to 'allow the One who knows what is good for us, unlike we ourselves, whose desire is for us and for our fruition, unlike the social other and its violent traps, to gain access to re-creating us from within, to giving us a “self”, an “I of desire” that is in fact a constant flow of treasure.'  (Liturgists like Derek will agree with this, too, I'm sure; I think he'd argue that this is exactly what liturgy does.  It gives the  "other Other" voice, via liturgical poetry, music, texts, scripts, actions, and concepts - and frequent repetition of all of the above.)

And again, I argue:  that's what the church is for.  Because what human being doesn't, in his heart, long to truly live - and while she's at it, to find access to "a constant flow treasure," consolation in distress - and a blessed release from fear and all crippling negativity?

“He opened up to them everything in the Scriptures concerning himself”

Attention Bible geeks:  Check out this piece by James Alison if you want to read something amazing!

The subtitle is:  "How can we recover Christological and Ecclesial habits of Catholic Bible Reading?" - and, of course, the title comes from the Road to Emmaus story in Luke 24.   But the topic is, actually, a "close reading" (to say the least) - a liturgical reading, at that! - of the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  Check out Alison's virtuosic exposition of it; it's long, and needs some time to digest, but it's worth it.

First, let’s listen to the parable [1]:

[Jesus] said, "There was a man who had two sons; and the younger of them said to his father, `Father, give me the share (μέρος) of property (οὐσίας) that falls to me.' And he divided his living (βίον) between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took his journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in loose living. And when he had spent everything, a great famine arose in that country, and he began to be in want. So he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have fed (ἐπιθύμει χορτασθηναι) on the pods that the swine ate; and no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself he said, `How many of my father's hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise (ἀναστὰς) and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants."' And he arose and came to his father. But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him (ἐπέπεσεν ἐπὶ τὸν τράχηλον αὐτου καὶ κατεφίλησεν αὐτόν). And the son said to him, `Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' But the father said to his servants (δούλους):"Bring quickly the best robe (στολὴν τὴν πρώτην), and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it (θύσατε), and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again (ἀνέζησεν); he was lost, and is found." And they began to make merry. "Now his elder son was in the field; and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what this meant. And he said to him, `Your brother has come (ὁ ἀδελφός σου ἥκει), and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has received him safe and sound.' But he was angry (ὠργίσθη) and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, `Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command (οὐδέποτε ἐντολήν σου παρηλθον); yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends. But when this son of yours (ὁ υἱός σου οὗτος) came, who has devoured your living with harlots (ὁ καταφαγών σου τὸν βίον μετὰ πορνῶν), you killed for him the fatted calf!' And he said to him, `Son (τέκνον), you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother (ὁ ἀδελφός σου οὗτος) was dead, and is alive (ἔζησεν); he was lost, and is found.'"

Now for a little bit of context. Please imagine that you are in a synagogue in first-century Palestine. Or perhaps better, just outside one, since on this occasion Jesus is teaching people who might find it painful to go inside a synagogue. Please also imagine that you are a Scribe or a Pharisee, removing from your imagination all the weight of the modern connotations of those words. That is to say, you don’t consider yourself a hypocrite: rather you are observant, modest and sober, you have a genuine religious enthusiasm, a sure devotion to the way of the Torah, a good knowledge of all the narratives and incidents which are received as Holy Writ, and you are authentically curious about this Jesus who might perhaps be a prophet.

You are used to there being a lectionary reading cycle in the synagogue. For over a century before Christ the books of Moses had been divided into 150 chunks so that the Torah would be read in its entirety over a three-year cycle. They had been divided according to the convenience of the feasts and the passages were known as sedarim. Also, more recently, readings of chunks of the Prophets had been added, and these were known as haftarot. So, there are appointed readings for every Sabbath, and the person who was entrusted with the reading and the commentary didn’t pick a text at random, but expounded the assigned readings. Unfortunately, we don’t have much evidence for the exact distribution of the readings at the time of Jesus, rather in the same way as we don’t have an exact knowledge of all the books which were considered holy by the diverse groups which made up the Hebrew people in the Palestine of the time. In both cases, our more exact knowledge begins somewhat after the period of the apostolic witnesses. Nevertheless, we do know that there was such a lectionary cycle and some elements of it can be glimpsed from the texts of the New Testament.

What would have been normal at the period would have been to take the appointed texts, and used them as a basis for constructing something for the edification of those present. And it is this that we see Jesus doing with the parable of the Prodigal Son. It looks as though we are faced with a teaching which has as its base the texts for the Feast of the Dedication of the Temple, where the appointed passages were Genesis 46, 28 – 47, 31 and Ezekiel 37, 15-28. Both texts refer to the difficult fraternal relationship between two tribes, Judah and Joseph, and to possible measures to overcome their differences and bring them together to form one single flock in celebration of God. At least, those were the texts for the feast in one of the three years of the cycle [2]. There has also been detected beneath the texts of this central part of Luke’s Gospel a commentary on several sections of the book of Deuteronomy [3]. The Torah passage in question on this occasion would have been Deuteronomy 21, 15-23, which instructs as to the distribution of an inheritance between an older and a younger brother, and then as to the appropriate treatment for a rebel son: that is to say, his being stoned to death. It ends with the indication that whoever is hanged from a tree dies under the curse of God. The passage from the Prophets would perhaps have been Malachi, either in its entirety (the book is not very long), or certain passages from it, since it begins with recalling an elder brother, whom God did not love, and a younger brother, whom God loved, and it ends with the promise of the return of the Prophet Elijah who will reconcile parents with their children and children with their parents [4].

The context of the parable is not only given by the texts of the Feast, but also the Feast itself: that of the Dedication of the Temple, now called Hanukah, or the Festival of Lights. This feast points, in the first place, to the re-dedication of the Temple in the mid second-century before Christ, and secondly to the original Dedication of the First Temple carried out by Solomon in what was already at the time of Christ the remote past. Knowing something about this living context will allow us to get a little further “inside” what Jesus is doing in offering us the parable.

I would also like to comment on the fact that we are dealing with a parable. Please forget the familiarity with which we pronounce this word. We have grown used to listening to Jesus’ parables as if they were simple and brilliant teachings which Jesus plucked out of thin air to the delight of the simple faithful, and the confusion of the learned. We are so little familiar with the Hebraic resonances of Jesus’ world that we jump almost immediately to an allegorical reading of the parable, as if the final version of the story were all that there is to be understood, and as if there were a more or less obvious allegorical application of the text. For example, that the Father is God, the Prodigal Son is the Christians, or sinful and repentant Jews; and the Elder Brother is the Pharisees, or perhaps Old Israel, and thus the bad guy in the story.

Well, I’d like to suggest that it wasn’t like that originally. A Parable is a much more interesting teaching technique than this. It is rather like launching a toy into the middle of a group of children who, at first, don’t understand what it is, nor what it does, since it confounds their expectations, and everything seems to be the wrong way round. So, bit by bit they take it apart so as then to be able to put the pieces together again as they begin to understand what it’s about. It is in the act of piecing it together that they begin to “get it” and understand what it’s for. This is what is important: with the parabolic method, if there is not first a moment of confusion, of having to pull the thing apart, then neither is there a process of learning and discovery.

Let me give you an example of this taken from our parable. When the prodigal son is homeward bound, the father espies him from a great distance and running towards him, falls on his neck and kisses him. This has served all of us as a beautiful reminder of how God is a Father who loves us and comes rushing towards us from long before we have reached him. And nothing in what I’m going to tell you should dim this memory. However, if we had heard the story in the context of the synagogue, our first confusion would have arisen because in Genesis, it is Joseph, the son and younger brother, who leaves his palace in Egypt, and goes out to meet his father, Jacob, who is arriving, along with his elder brother Judah, so as to receive him, from a great way off. When they meet, Joseph falls on his father’s neck (Gen 46, 29). Earlier he has fallen on his brothers’ necks and covered them with kisses – the phrase is the same (Gen 45, 14-15). So, the first reference point for the father in the parable is not God, but Joseph, the younger brother, and it is towards the far land that Jacob and the elder brothers are journeying for the festive re-encounter.

It is also possible that there is here a word game from which Jesus might have drawn fruit, for Joseph goes out to Goshen to receive Jacob and Judah, and might not someone have noticed that the name of Moses’ firstborn son was Gershon? There is enough similarity among the consonants for such a word game. Gershon was born while Moses, himself a younger brother, was living exiled from Egypt, in the land of the Midianites, whose flocks he tended. He was married to a daughter of Midian, Zipporah, and their eldest son’s name means “I am a stranger in a foreign land”.

Well, I hope that you are suitably confused, and that a series of confusions is beginning to open up. The father can equally well be Joseph, or God, or even the Pharaoh from the Joseph story, since he gives the younger son a ring and places him over all that is his. So far, the place where they are living might equally be Israel or Egypt. The younger brother might equally well be Joseph, or Moses, or Jacob (the younger brother of Esau) or even Abel (Cain’s younger brother). He might also be the younger son who appears in the passage of Deuteronomy 21 about dividing a father’s inheritance. This younger son receives only a third of the inheritance, since his elder brother receives two-thirds according to the Law. The younger son might also be the rebellious son who is to be taken outside the city to be killed according to the command of Deuteronomy, whether the killing be by stoning or by hanging him from a tree.

In the same vein, the elder brother could be the one from Deuteronomy who receives the two-thirds share of the inheritance; he might also be Aaron, Moses’ elder brother, or Cain, or Ishmael, or Esau or Judah. Which is to say that there is a wide spectrum of possible occupants of each place in the parable, and we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility that they are all there, in a sort of kaleidoscope: now one appears, now another, all in different configurations vis-à-vis each other.

In this kaleidoscopic vision, the elder brother who comes back from the fields and complains that his father hasn’t even given him a kid so as to celebrate with his friends, might be Cain the horticulturalist coming back from the fields where he has just killed Abel the shepherd, so as to meet up with Joseph, who is Abel risen from the dead. He might equally be Esau, whose primogeniture had been stolen from him by Jacob through a piece of trickery involving the hide of a goat; and the father might be Isaac trying to help his elder son overcome his anger and his envy. Or indeed, the elder brother might represent Joseph’s elder brothers who, after having sold Joseph, killed a goat so as to bloody Joseph’s coat of many colours, thus convincing their father, Jacob, that Joseph was dead. And of course the punch line of the Joseph story, as of our parable, is the reversal of this when Jacob is able to say “Joseph my son is still alive” (Gen 45, 28; see also 45, 3).

I hope that you are beginning to suspect that the parable, rather than being a finished story is rather more like a collection of hooks from which hang many references, allusions, and lines of thought which a good storyteller might follow. Only if we grasp something of the richness of those allusions, and of the different ways in which they can be blended, do we have some sense of why they have been so well put together within the schema of the parable which Jesus is casting before his listeners.

Now, let us follow the story, noticing some curiosities as we move forward. First there is the distribution of the property. On asking for his inheritance, the younger brother receives a third part, which is what would correspond to him on the death of his father, since his elder brother, following Deuteronomy 21 would receive two thirds. As it happens, that “third part” turns up again in the Prophet Zechariah, whom the New Testament, and apparently Jesus himself in his own teaching, follows very closely. For that “third part” is the portion of the flock which belongs to the Shepherd who is going to be wounded, and it will be saved, while the two thirds will perish. Might it not be the case that the parable is alerting us as to how strange it is that the Good Shepherd, the one who is to fulfil the Scriptures, is going to be like a younger son, whose own family, following both Deuteronomy and Zechariah [5], treat him as a rebellious son and take him outside the city to kill him?

Interpreting Deuteronomy in the light of Zechariah wouldn’t be at all impossible for a teacher and an audience accustomed to Midrash, the family of Jewish interpretative techniques. And let us remember that it is just at this point of Deuteronomy that there appears the famous phrase “the one who is hanged on a tree is under the curse of God” (Deut 21, 23) from which St Paul will derive such important conclusions (Gal 3, 13). Let us add to this the referential framework of the Joseph story, where it is the younger brother who is cast out and left to die, but who gets to be the one who forgives his brothers and receives them into the land of plenty, recognizing that that was what God had been planning for all of them all along (Gen 45, 7-8; 50, 19-21). It looks indeed as though this referential framework is at work here as a storyline which allows the rather cruel passage from Deuteronomy to be re-read against the human sacrifice which it apparently commands. It makes of it instead a prophecy of a reconciliation which is to be brought about by a sacrificed son, considered to be a rebel, and led to his death apparently under the curse of God. In modern terms, we would say that it is the text of the Joseph story which provides the hermeneutic which allows the texts of Deuteronomy to be read in an apparently inverted way. And we need have no doubt as to the presence in the parable of the capacity to make such an inversion: this is demonstrated by the change of roles which we have already observed between the the one who comes out to receive the other while the other is yet far off, falling on his neck and covering him with kisses.

Let’s get back to the parable. The younger son goes off with his inheritance, and being in a far-off land, he fritters it away. So, he deserves nothing more. When a serious famine hits that country, the son goes to work for one of the locals, as Moses went to work for a Midianite. The son even longs to eat the food which is given to the pigs, a splendid element in the story, for it demonstrates to a Hebrew public the repugnant degree of sordidness to which the son has fallen. It also brings to mind the Maccabees, the heroes of the story of the Dedication of the Temple, who preferred to undergo death rather than eating pork, which is what the Greek king was trying to get them to do. And our younger son certainly feels the pangs of longing to eat the pigs’ food – and the words “ἐπιθύμει χορτασθηναι” “he desired to satisfy himself” may be an echo of the Israelites in the wilderness whose desire to return to Egypt and eat the food from there came to be a symbol of the very nature of distorted desire (1 Cor 10, 6).

However, that younger son “comes to himself”, and here we begin to get some very interesting words. He realises that he might be better off living somewhere else, in the house of his father, even if only as a servant. And he says, literally, “Arising, I will go”, but the Greek word is “ἀναστὰς” and it is also the technical term for what happened to the High Priest when he was ordained and prepared for the Angelic life: he was “raised” or “resurrected” [6]. The idea was that the High Priest already lived a life of angelic “resurrection” while communing with YHWH in the sanctuary, and representing YHWH before the people. So, a priestly element is entering the story. Solomon himself announces, at the beginning of his dedication of the Temple, that he has “arisen” or “ascended” to the dwelling of his father (2 Chronicles 6, 10). Any doubt about this disappears when we hear the younger son preparing himself for his return to his father’s house, for he uses a set phrase which would have been well known: “Father I have sinned against heaven and before you”. This may well have been a liturgical phrase from the Atonement rite on Yom Kippur [7], in rather the same way as we recite in the Mass the penitential formula “I confess before Almighty God and before you my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned…”. In other words, suddenly the younger son is the High Priest who is going to enter his Father’s dwelling carrying out the rite of Atonement, a rite which was inaugurated by Solomon in his dedication of the Temple (2 Chronicles 6 and 7).

This leads us to some considerations about the presence of Moses in our story. For Moses was a younger brother, he lived in a foreign land, and he began, with the people of Israel, the return to the Promised Land, which was also the land of the Fathers, or Patriarchs. However, after the idolatry of the Israelites, that is, when they allowed themselves to be overcome by their desires, Moses offered to make atonement for his people (Exodus 32, 30-34). Nevertheless, God did not allow him to do this, telling him merely that he (God) would send an angel before him. It would not have been difficult for Jesus to link this angel, a priestly figure, to King Solomon who did manage to achieve an atonement which was accepted by God when the fire consumed his offerings in the Temple, and to the future prophet whom Moses promised the people of Israel in the book of Deuteronomy [8], just before our passage about sons and inheritance. The link is made even stronger if the younger son is not only the shepherd who is to going to be wounded, but the priest-prophet who is going to carry out the definitive Atonement, and on his way to the sacrifice will be considered a rebel son to be killed, and his sacrifice reckoned a curse from God. That is to say, part of what is going on in the parable is the suggestion that “one greater than Moses is here, one greater than Solomon”, and an insinuation as to the manner by which the coming prophet will fulfil what was lived out and promised by Moses himself, and prefigured by Solomon. Thus it will be known that he is a true prophet [9].

So, the son “rises” in a priestly manner towards the sanctuary of his Father. The Father shows himself viscerally moved – ἐσπλαγχνίσθη – which is rather specially the emotion of God, his “chesed”, by running towards him, falling on his neck and kissing him, just as Joseph, another younger brother, had done with his father and brothers. Please notice that the dynamic of the father who forgives is exactly the same dynamic as the brother, expelled and left for dead, who forgives his brothers. Divine paternity is cast in a recognisably fraternal form.

At this point, the High Priest pronounces the penitential formula, but the Father doesn’t even speak to him. In fact, once our younger brother has recited his penitential formula, he totally disappears as a protagonist. He neither says nor does anything else at all. In fact it is as though, once he has become a sacrifice of expiation, he no longer has a separate role to play. The Father speaks instead to the servants, and here we have another piece of word play. Because the priests were also known as “servants” while the High Priest, above all at the time of the Atonement Rite when he acted “in personam” YHWH, was known as “Son”. So the Father tells the servants to put on his son “στολὴν τὴν πρώτην” which might be both “a very fine tunic” or indeed, the priestly robe with which the priests dressed the High Priest when he came out of the sanctuary for the sacrifice. He tells them to put a ring on his finger, in just the same way as Pharaoh had placed his ring on Joseph’s finger, signalling Joseph’s role as Viceroy, that is to say, the one who was to exercise the Pharaoh’s royalty before all (Genesis 41, 42-44). And he tells them to put sandals on his feet, for earlier Moses had had to take off his sandals before the Presence, but now, since the Atonement has been accomplished, the Prophet who fulfils what Moses began, the one who can indeed enter into the Presence, this one can put on sandals. In other words, the Son is being enthroned as Priest, King, and Prophet, all together.

Symbolizing and inaugurating the feast and the rejoicing, the fatted calf is sacrificed (and the word is “θύσατε” – the term for sacrificial slaughter) in the same way that Solomon ordered thousands of bulls to be killed, and the feasting begins. It would not be too much to remember that in the book of Leviticus (Leviticus 8, 12-14) it is the younger brother, Moses, who ordains his elder brother, Aaron, as High Priest. He anoints him with oil, dresses him in a tunic, and girds him around with a girdle. And then he sacrifices the calf as a sin offering, following the same order that we find in Luke. Once again the father figure and that of the younger brother flow into one single role in the rite of ordination. Now the father speaks in the same way as Jacob speaks of Joseph: that his son who he had long thought dead is in fact alive. But here he signals that he is also celebrating the fact that the Son (the High Priest) has “risen”, that is, has made his “ἀνάστὰσις”, and that everything which has been achieved by the rite of Atonement can now be celebrated with noisy jubilation.

Meanwhile the elder brother is in the field, but as he returns and draws near to the house (and “τη οἰκία” may always refer to the Temple also), he hears the sound of singing and dancing, and so calls one of the servants to find out what’s going on. The servant replies with a curious phrase, for he does not say “your brother has returned”. The word “return” would have penitential connotations, since the word “shuv” in Hebrew means “turn” or “repent”. Instead he says “your brother has come” or “is present”, “and your father has sacrificed the fatted calf on getting him back safe and sound”. Which is to say, the servant is giving the reason for the joy, and the festivities, of the Presence, which is what is maximally realised in the rite of Atonement.

At this the elder brother becomes enraged – ὠργίσθη – and refuses to go inside. And indeed, his wrath is not without interest, since at the great feast of the Presence which is fulfilled with the Atonement it was well understood that wrath – ὀργη – was in the air, and was in fact attributed to God. It was understood that in the composite person of the Priest and the Lamb, YHWH was offering himself as an expiation to protect his faithful ones. However, it was reckoned that the Wrath would fall upon those who were not covered over by the blood of the Lamb. The image was of the Wrath emanating from the Holy Place to avenge God’s enemies: from this, people needed protection. Here in the parable however, and in absolute coherence with all his teaching, Jesus inverts the expectation, showing that the only wrath which is present is purely human, purely anthropological. In the feast of the Presence, with Victim, Priest and King enthroned, there is no room for vengeance. The only wrath which is present, and it is very powerful indeed, is the sort of envy which leads one brother to kill another.

Those who know the narrative of the Dedication of the Temple will remember at this moment that when Solomon had carried out the ceremony, the Glory of the Presence came down with such strength that the priests, sons of Aaron, couldn’t enter into the Lord’s House (2 Chronicles 5, 14; 7, 2). You will also remember how Moses was unable to enter into the tent of the Tabernacle when the Glory was dwelling in it (Exodus 40, 34-38). Yet here it is the elder brother himself who is keeping himself outside, out of envy of his brother, just like Cain, and Esau, and the brothers and father of Joseph, all of whom were full of envy. It is envy which makes it impossible to perceive the Presence, far less enter into it.

Now the father comes out in person in order to beseech him, with no hint of violence or vengeance – there is no Wrath coming out of the sanctuary. Rather the father speaks to him as it were from below, acting as the humble spokesman for the plenitude of that forgiving and non-vengeful Presence. Of course, the father has allowed himself to be defined by that Presence. He begs the elder brother to come in to the feast of the celebration of the Presence. The elder brother explains that he has been a servant. And indeed he has, he has been the servant to the priesthood, through the order of Levites. And he has never put aside one of the father’s commandments – for the phrase in Greek hints at the commandments of the Law “οὐδέποτε ἐντολήν σου παρηλθον”. It would seem, in fact that he is representing an obedient order of Levites, whose ordination had occurred when Moses commanded them to kill their brethren among the people of Israel who had participated in the building of the Golden Calf [10]. The elder brother even says that his father never gave him a kid with which to celebrate with his friends. This may be a reference to the prohibition of the Levites from carrying out the tasks of the Priesthood in the matter of sacrificing live animals which appears in the book of Numbers (Numbers 18, 1-23). And naturally it will call to mind, as I have already mentioned, the fact that Cain, whose sacrifice was not acceptable, practiced horticulture, while Abel was a shepherd, and his sacrifice was acceptable. It will also summon up memories of the different pieces of sheep and goat-related skulduggery which pepper the Hebrew Scriptures [11]. We might even imagine in the voice of the elder brother a tone of complaint that, unlike what happened with Abraham and Isaac, God had not provided for sacrifice (Genesis 22, 8. 13) with a substitute lamb which might teach him not to sacrifice his brother. In his envy he is unable to recognise that the brother who is present is exactly that lamb who YHWH has provided, providing himself.

Next the elder brother himself refers to his brother as “this son of yours”, recognising in his envy that the one who he does not even deign to call “my brother” has been elevated to the rank of “Son”. And he criticizes his father, since he claims that this son “has devoured your living with harlots”, and even so, the father has sacrificed the fatted calf for him. The phrase is very interesting indeed. In Greek it reads as follows: “ὁ υἱός σου ουτος ὁ καταφαγών σου τὸν βίον μετὰ πορνων”. Now if we read that sentence in priestly idiom, then this Son has not devoured the living, so much as eaten up the life, of the father. In the same way that the priest eats the body of the lamb which is YHWH once the sacrifice has been offered on the alter. And the High Priest has done this amongst an idolatrous people. In his envy, the Levite doesn’t realise what he himself is saying, for the High Priest is precisely the one who eats and distributes the very life of God, being his Son, as forgiveness in the midst of a people given to fornication, or idolatry – notions which are interchangeable in the prophetic texts. And the fact that the Son is now present, his priestly mission fulfilled, is very justly symbolized by the sacrifice of the fatted calf in the feast of the Presence. Between an accusation of immorality and a recognition of priestly presence, there lies only the blindness which is the fruit of envy, and the irony of the good storyteller.

As if this were not enough, the father who has listened to the bitterness of the elder brother now addresses him as τέκνον – which is to say “child”. It is in fact a tender word, but it is not the same as “son”, which is important since, as we have seen, both the father and the elder brother reserve the word ‘υἱός’, with all of its implications of high priesthood, for the younger brother. “Child” says the father “you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours”. And here, just in case further detail were needed, we are once again plunged into a reference to the Levites, and indeed into the same central section of Deuteronomy which has lain beneath the surface of our parable. For there it says (Deuteronomy 18, 1-2; cf. also Numbers 3, 5-13):

The Levitical priests, that is, all the tribe of Levi, shall have no portion or inheritance with Israel; they shall eat the offerings by fire to the LORD, and his rightful dues. They shall have no inheritance among their brethren; the LORD is their inheritance, as he promised them.

And so we are at the end, as we were at the beginning, faced with words about inheritance. But it now turns out that the elder brother also has as his inheritance the Lord, who is by definition inexhaustible. So the elder brother should have no envy as to how the Lord distributes what is his and brings it to a good ending. The one who is more than Moses, more than Solomon, younger brothers both, has arrived. The Dedication of the new Temple which is himself, more originary than even the temple of Solomon, is being carried out. In the parable we are given all the elements necessary for an extraordinary recapitulation of the entire story of Israel starting with Abel, passing through Moses and Solomon, and pointing towards the definitive sacrifice which will overcome all the ambiguities in the previous sacrificial regime. The insinuation is that this sacrifice is indeed about to take place. The parable leaves open the question, or throws down the challenge: will the elder brother overcome the envy which keeps him out of the house, of the Temple, of Paradise? Will he accept receiving his inheritance at the hands of his risen brother? Will he enter in to take part in the Feast of the Presence?

I'm not clear, yet, on what he's saying in his subtitle; IOW, I don't understand why this is an example of "recovering Christological and Ecclesial habits of Catholic Bible Reading."  It looks like a Midrashic exercise to me - but what an exercise!  How amazing to see all these resonances and inferences brought to the surface!

A fantastic example of "bringing out of the treasure-house things that are old and things that are new," IMO.    Alison's background in Evangelicalism has served him well as he throws the Catholic outer garment over himself.  (Hint:  this should be right in the Anglican wheelhouse, folks.  Note the the part about Jesus "teaching people who might find it painful to go inside a synagogue"; a little bit about "the outsider" here, a central TEC concern - but note how much more there is to it all.....)