Let Go of Jesus

December 1, 2010 By George Elerick 4 Comments

Jesus said to her “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

Jesus had to leave in order for his friends to realize that ‘Lo, I am with you always till the end of the age’.

Jesus had to dematerialize for his movement to materialize. This is very much like belief, it too must dematerialize to materialize into its naturally maleable form. Mary’s desire to be close to Jesus is quite admirable. Here is someone who share her life with Jesus, who ate and drank with the Rabbi from Nazareth, they were friends in a society where this was a little more than taboo. For Mary to want to embrace the risen Jesus is an act of social change.

There is a symbiotic connection, a history that is present here. It’s tangible. The tension you could cut with a knife. Rather than turn and embrace her or even validate her feelings, Jesus pushes her away. In a sense, he rejects her. Jesus has to reject us so we can find him. Mary has arrived with the idea that Jesus has come to stay. She has arrived with her ideas that Jesus is still the same as he has been. I wonder if we do the same?

Sometimes we might enter into the Jesus narrative expecting Jesus to be the same person we learned about in Sunday School or the Jesus we talked about a week ago. But somehow he seems distant. He seems cold and calculated. He sees something we don’t, our inability or fear of change. He pushed the envelope with us. He walks away. He turns his back on us. He has things to do that are more important than us. This stings and has emotional consequences, yet Jesus stays the course. Why? Because if he stays we won’t go anywhere.

We will just follow. We will just listen.
We won’t act unless he acts.
We will believe what he tells us
and never challenge it.
We will become Jesus zombies.

Jesus doesn’t want zombies, he doesn’t want cognitive slaves, he wants people who are willing to use their freedom to subvert the empire, the social order and love the other. Jesus realizes if he stays that he is going to become a distraction from what he came to do – to show us how to transform the globe.

Sometime I think we want so badly to be just like Mary, wanting so passionately to hold Jesus and thinking that holding Jesus is going to make the world a better place, but Jesus has to leave the world for it to get better. He tells her to let him go.

Maybe one of the best things for Christianity to do is to let go of Jesus.

I am not saying we must reject what Jesus stands for, but maybe we need to overcome the inherent addiction to create theological kingdoms around the person of Jesus. In this light, we must be willing to invite the rejection of Jesus to come and deliver us from the need to make sense of Jesus. We want to keep Jesus right where he is and right where we think he should be. Jesus disagrees with this idea, this is why ultimately theology fails us, because if we commit to that, we will never get to know the Jesus who ‘is not here’, the

Jesus who transcends us.

In this moment, the Jesus who transends us, is the Jesus who becomes post-structural, post-identity. Jesus divorces himself from a moment where someone is trying to frame him into who he was prior to his death encounter. Jesus is more than who he was before his death, he makes that point clear in this liberating act of rejection. Jesus in this moment rejects the idea of identity in the philosophical sense. He ultimately infoms Mary that he is beyond it. The reference about the Father is a phrase of transcendence. Jesus is saying he is beyond this. I also think he was teaching her something (as well as us) about identity. That we can get too comfortable with what we know about someone else close to us. We must constantly look for opportunities to see the Jesus who lies beyond what we know. Once we invite his rejection we can realize that is always with us…

I think another key element in this narrative, is that Mary is the one who is truly rejecting Jesus. She is rejecting Jesus for who he could be, for all of who he is. Mary can’t seem to let go of the Jesus she loved and who loved him. Rejection is a hard thing, especially if the person you see in front of you has changed your life in a dramatic way. It’s like someone stabbing you in the back. We need Jesus to ‘stab us in the back’, I know this sounds harsh, but the longer we commit to fighting for our own versions of Jesus the longer he stays right where he shouldn’t be. Jesus obviously has a place, an idea, and a goal in mind. He subverts her desire for him to stay right where she thinks she needs him to be.

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It is in her rejection that she finds the ability to move. To run. To tell others. In Jesus’ rejection of her, there is freedom. She finds it and it literally moves her. If we spend so much time in hollowed (not hallowed) discourse on the person of Jesus and try to keep him where we think he should be, then his rejection of us is inevitable and we should welcome and invite it. Because it is in his rejection that we find salvation from all the Jesus’ we’ve met.

In the cartoon Open Season 2 there is a German Daschund name ‘Weanie’. He gets lost along the way and finds himself in the wild, towards the end of the movie he discovers he is better settled at home. In his traditional environment. Mary thought Jesus belonged in his traditional environment, but, it seems Jesus thinks he belongs in the wild, where they roam. Where they uknown lives and breathes. It seems Jesus finds comfort in ‘not being here’, but rather in being everywhere.

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Love: The Disruptive Absence

November 3, 2010 By George Elerick 233 Comments

“Parallax: the apparent displacement of an object as seen from two different points that are not on a line with the object”

“Hey, she was so easy to love. But wait, I guess that love wasn’t enough.” – Nelly

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** Spoiler Alert for the movie: The Box**

Our ideas of love are informed by the world we interact with. When we are rejected we learn what love is or what we think love should not be. When we receive flowers and chocolates, we solidify in our minds that maybe love looks something like that. Our idea of love is constituted. Constituted by society. By our beliefs. By those things we don’t believe. By our experience.

Our desire for things is an excess. Love is one such excess.

We tend to create desire out of the desire of the other. The other could be law, society, God, peers and Other others. We attempt to try to fill these gaps of desire with things that cannot truly fill them. They are representations of representations. And so they aren’t Real, they are simply real. The idea of love is a shadow to love. All of our ideas of love make up what love should/could be.

The idea of love is a fabled construct we bow to socially.

Hollywood is one such god that has created a perverse enterprise on trying to define what love should be under the obscene guise of an idealistic notion that love is meant to make us feel good. It seems Zizek’s thoughts on love are bit more in tune with the social order Jesus spoke of, “What does love feel like? Like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.” Love isn’t meant to make you feel good, its meant to ruin your life. Its meant to be a mirror that shows us the ‘grotesquesness’ of our narcissism.

Let me make this as personal as possible to bring home this point. Do I love my wife? Yes and no. I love my wife as I think she should be. But since she does not always fit the role I think she should, I am simply loving the facade that I have created in my mind that replaces her. I am loving something that isn’t there. I am loving an absence. A perverse hope. The redemption of love lies in Zizek’s Parallax.

If love is born out of desire, and desire is always in excess than love is never truly enough. We will always crave more love. We will continually desire desire. It is the abuse or neglect of this excess that draws people to the most outlandish lengths to do the supposed crazy things expoused by love. Standing on rooftops, singing in public, buying Valentine’s Day cards and so on. Its the excess that drives us all to irrational lengths.

In the movie The Box with Cameron Diaz and James Marsden, you have two characters who have been socially and vocationally displaced. Their displacement leads them to make an irrational decision under the guise of a promise for a better future. In the end this irrational decision leads them down a few paths that end in their familial demise. Love inherently displaces two people, rather than being in the right place at the right time, it puts two people together in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It upsets the rhythm of life.

This is why the whole idea of loving your enemy is the right place at the right time because that relationship is already in sheer displacement. To love one’s enemy is to disrupt the rhythm of displacement. To love your neighbour however is to disrupt the natural order of things. Love is disruptive. It doesn’t save us. It condemns us to a life of disruptive servitude; this disruption is the element that transforms the world.

Towards the end of the movie, the husband is left with a decision to restore his son’s hearing and sight at the expense of the life of his wife. He ends his wife’s life under the promise of an after-life that he has metaphorically experienced. In this example, love forces us to kill our representations of love. By doing so, we save the Other. The Other is the thing that we look to to help define our world and each other. As in life, some people make their children ‘their world’ in this instance the child becomes the Other. Most parents if pushed would realistically die to save their children.

This altruistic act is fueled by the notion that the parent’s death will make a difference in the life of the child. In this instance, this isnt an act of love, but rather it is love’s perverted excess in motion. The father who makes the decision and shoots his wife for the sake of his child is led by an absent possibility of the afterlife. The absence is the reality that he cannot see the afterlife, but hopes it is real. He is fueled by an absence to make an ethical choice that is meant to make things better, but in the end doesn’t stop the cycle that he and his wife initially participated in (pressing the button on the box).

Love is the ability to betray that absence in light of any circumstance. Judas’ act of betrayal to Jesus was an act of love. The ability to betray someone is an act of love. He had hope his death would make a difference in the life of Jesus. The choice to not betray is another act of simple love. Love arises out of the gap between the absence and the choice.

When we betray all of the representations of love, then we are love with nothing else than a love that has entered into Lacan’s Real. The Real in this example can also be named the great Unsaid or horror. When Love enters the Real it becomes as it was meant to be, horrific and displacing. The moment love does not displace the object it is meant to love, it is something other than love. It is a perversion of love. To love someone in an altruistic sense means we must be willing to displace them. Displace them from where they are into an alternate state of being.

Love is the reparation of being.

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What Curious George, Oz, Huckabees Have to Teach Us About Pain

September 28, 2010 By George Elerick 2 Comments

I remember clutching to my Curious George doll when I was five years old, tears falling in a cloud of confusion. One hand holding on to my dad’s shirt and wondering why my sister and I were being taken away. That night, I was in so much pain. I still wonder how in one moment, how one person can experience so much loss? Are we destined to feel pain, to lose, to get diseases and die? Is this our fate? These are very loaded questions. Below is merely an opinion in response to those questions…

Pain forces us to look outside of ourselves. Sometimes in the middle of searching for the thing outside of us, we sometimes the thing that lies outside of us isn’t some ideal heaven waiting for us, but that heaven lies in the person next to us. Heaven is the realization that we don’t have to go through this alone. that no matter how hard, painful, diseased life gets that we are part of something even bigger than death — humanity.

Because hollywood is good at finding ways to distort our desire, or because our Sunday School teachers have been trained to believe in non-existent idealism, we have come to believe the lie that perfection lies somewhere over the rainbow. That Oz is waiting for us to find it. Don’t get me wrong, I am open to the possibility that Heaven does exist, but I think its a lot different than we think.

I think its here, now.
When we choose to be there for one another, that is heaven.

Some look at the early parts of Genesis as a narrative about sin and why we experience this groaning within, but I think that that explanation might fall short not only of its context, but also castrate the power of realizing that pain, disease, death are part of our divinity. That to be divine is to experience and embrace what we have come to call our depravity or fallibility.

That to experience pain, pleasure, sadness, grief, loss, disease is a part of the experience of what it means to be humanly divine.

This doesn’t mean we don’t try to journey on and make sense of why we experience what we experience. To me, that is an essential part of the journey, but to reduce our life experiences down to the cause of sin almost cheapens life down to a process where we fix something we aren’t capable of fixing.

Death, disease, pain and loss are inevitable as sun in the summer. But, they aren’t the enemy.

The Hebrew word for pain is ahahh, pronounced a-haw. It means ‘Oh’ with an exclamation. Its like the ‘Oh’ not again. Or ‘Oh’ I can’t believe this happened. Its an exclamation and epiphany of powerlessness over that situation. Not a bad place to be. It’s a good place to be. Why? Because it reminds us that there is something bigger than now that is happening. That we aren’t the center of the story. That there is more to our own importance at stake. To experience ‘Oh’ is to experience liberation out of our need to be in control.

Notice that the Hebrew word for pain isn’t a way to fix the pain. It embraces the pain as part of the reality, yet it still honestly responds to it. Sometimes we have this idea that to be self-less means to never mention our struggles, but what if our silence is impeding others in their opportunity to be there for you? Your grief is their growth. Your growth is their grief.

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